The Power of Consistent Training

Welcome to the Leading Lane Podcast for Real Estate Pros by Real Estate Pros with your hosts, Ashley Frederick and Steven Burch. If you're looking for an honest, authentic and raw perspective, you found it. Welcome back to the Leading Lane podcast. Today we're going to get into the the fun topic of when do you do training? How often do you do training? What does that look like in your world? So Ashley, how often do you. Do you hear my Benny going crazy over here? How often do you do your trainings with your agents? That's a great question. You know, when we first started it was pretty sporadically as far as like maybe when something came up. But I think over time we understood the importance of training and just that real estate is ever changing and every day something comes up. So we actually implemented making one of our agents that really enjoys training in charge of training. So for me as the broker owner, I just felt like I couldn't give the amount of time to training that frequently, especially just being busy running the brokerage, etc. And I wanted to make sure that it wasn't like half assed, more or less. I wanted to make sure that it was somebody that could spend some good time with it. So we made Charles our director of training. So he is in charge of kind of the training schedule. And we do it weekly now. So Monday mornings from basically 9 to 10. All agents are welcome. You know, if there's a holiday, which I never noticed how many holidays actually fall on a Monday, but then we just rearrange it to another day, like Labor Day falls on Monday, so it's getting moved to Wednesday. But we also have like a calendar, like a floor calendar. And then on there we actually have all of the sessions of what it's planned for that month. So you know, next Monday I think it's, I'm sure it has to do with scripts for the situations that we're in right now, how to deal with other agents. So it's weekly and I would say that it's in office as well. So I know that some people do a lot of things virtually, which I think could work. But for us here locally, small town usa, everybody comes in on Monday. I think sometimes when there's certain topics maybe that doesn't, somebody doesn't feel like they need anything, they, they might not attend. So that's every Monday. And then every once a month on the third Thursday we do like an all staff, more or less lunch and learn. So we have employees, admin staff, all agents, myself, Stephanie come in and we Pick, like, whatever we think might need the. The most attention at that time current to the market. And then I think we've talked about how we do our, like, planning out our three months or six or four months. So last Thursday, we sat down and we all had our arts and crafts hour where we, you know, did our personal goals and our real estate goals, and then we have to write them out, and then we go over them with everybody. So it's a sticky, like one of those big stickies that you put on the wall and you go over things and then everyone gets to question if they have any questions about your goals or if they think that you're being too lenient with yourself. But, yeah, so that's kind of fun because, like, you know, I think for agents, it's interesting to put something up there. But I also have found that, like, when they see, like, another agent say, I'm going to try to do this, like, that'll jog something in their memory. Or it's really great. Like, last week, somebody put something and then another agent was like, well, could you help me with mine? That's what I love about our group is we're not competitors against each other. We're trying to help one another because we're all different. So how you interact with people is all different. But I have found it. We've been doing that for the. The Mondays and then the. Once a month, I would say say two years, and then not necessarily like training, but that follows up with our. Our quarterly reviews, which we can talk about a little bit later, but just from finishing up those. And one of the questions is, like, what's most beneficial? And I mean, the feedback was the trainings. So I think that we're doing the right thing. Kudos to Charles for putting the time and effort into making those worth everyone's while. But what about you? What does your training schedule look like? Well, you know, it's funny because I think when I first got into leadership and doing this type of stuff, like, I felt that training had to be this big production, PowerPoint, all of these handouts and, you know, all these worksheets, et cetera. And in reality, we really train every single day. Every single day. Right. Like, there's always a question that pops up. There's something that's going on with the transaction. How do you handle this? And, you know, the goal for me is to be able to turn that into a training opportunity, not only for that one agent, but then for multiple other people as well. So in. But the way that we structure the calendar is we have weekly sales meetings which it's one hour a week that we have everybody come in. We kind of restructured a little bit this year with the change for Ryan being the managing broker, he does one mandatory meeting per month and then the others are now trainings a little bit more, you know, tools, tech, contract type of thing. But that one hour a week really is the way I explain to our agents is that's all I'm asking for you to show up. Really. I want you to show up. We want to make sure that we're bringing good content that every single person, regardless if you're a brand new agent or you're, you've been in it for forever that you're walking away with something of value. And you were like, okay, that was totally worth my time. So it's once a week. And then we hired this last year director of member relations and her position is to be able to do the 30, 60 90s work with agents one on one more on the development side of things and the tools and tech so that we can hyper focus more on the in depth legal, legality type of things, word tracks on sales and whatnot. So it really was a, it was great when we did that because it divided and conquered. You know, not that I can't train on something, you know, design center or help somebody with a 30, 60, 90. I, I feel that my time with the agent is more the, the nuts and bolts of the business versus the how to do a piece of technology. So that has been tremendous for us to be able to have somebody just like what you have with Charles, to be able to, you know, push that off to somebody else, which allows me, Don, to free up for, for other tasks as well. But I think that for our agents actually posted yesterday in Blink, you know, like what is, what is the real reason why everybody's hanging around and staying with our company? Like give me the what's up? And every single comment on there was talking about the training and then the support and yes, you know, like, and I make it very clear to my agency, I know that you can go other places and get a higher commission split and you know, go do whatever you want to do. Essentially if you want to, you can open up your own if you wanted to. But our goal is to provide so much value in the training and support that they know that that is something that is crucial to their business. So training is, it's something that I again I got kind of steered away from at the very beginning because I Had this bullshit story in my, my brain of what it was supposed to be like. But in reality, again, every day is a training. Every opportunity is a training. And what I love too about ours, you know, we talked about blink on here before. You have blink, but the being able to have our team ask questions within blink and post them to where their peers are able to now see allows for the camaraderie and the virtual extension. And now people are working with one another so we don't have to physically sit in the office. We now have a communication app that we have literally at our fingertips. So, yeah, in training, I mean, there's so many different webinars and different things other than what we do on a local level. So I think it's, you know, we almost become a little bit of a marketer internally to market for these other opportunities that agents can take advantage of. And our goal is just kind of to be able to communicate that out to them to get them to attend. Yeah, I agree. Two things you said that I thought were important were the divide and conquer. And so I think that, you know, that's just something important for maybe other broker owners to think about. I think that mostly if we're broker owners, we probably have a little bit of a control freak aspect to it, but. Right. It's kind of like we talk about if you have strengths, right. And it's not that you're not a good trainer, but maybe that's just not where your time is best spent. You know, we compensate our director of training for the time that he puts into that. And so maybe, you know, I encourage people to look at their current agent load and see if there's somebody that's killing it. I did talk to another broker about that where, you know, he's busy as a selling agent and as well and wants to train, but thought that, you know, it just was eating up his time. And I asked if there was an agent in his office that does really well and said there was one that, you know, always is helping everyone. I was like, maybe that's an opportunity for. I think she was looking for a higher split. So my advice to them was instead of the higher split, could you offer her some type of compensation to train other agents? And I think again, it's just kind of thinking outside that box, but finding someone else that's really great at that, that's respected by the other agents just as opportunity. And I think sometimes maybe agents might be a little bit more open. Right. If you think like maybe with another agent versus, you know, Sometimes people are afraid of the broker or whatnot, which, you know, that all comes with time, but just great for then, like if there is something that comes up that like everybody ends up stumped with, like that's a great thing then for us to go over in an office meeting. So I think that that's a great opportunity is for people to maybe just look within who's already in their company and see if there's maybe someone that could help them out with that. Right. And you know, with that too, like the, the aspect of when there is an something that happens in a transaction or whatever, you learn something. You know what we do, I say it's, you know, we're throwing you under the bus, but in reality we're not throwing anybody under the bus, but we want to have that open discussion with everybody. We're not going to disclose who the person was or, you know, the details to, you know, out this person. But it's talking about it in general and then being able to use that because it's happening right now. And so if it's happening right now, we know that it potentially can happen to somebody else here very, very soon. So if we can share those little hiccups and turbulence, you know, across the board to get everybody, you know, understanding of what's going on and talk about it, to make sure that we're going out about it the right direction. It's more brain power together. One thing that I think we've talked about Asana in the past, but we use it for our weekly meetings. So there's a project and then it's like every week is dated. So what I've trained our office manager and our admin to do is that if something comes up in transactions or they think maybe like we should talk about this, I just have them throw it in our asana as a reminder for us to talk about on Mondays, but then add it to our agenda for the office meeting. So it's just sometimes I think we're so busy that we forget everything that's going on. So it's just a really great reminder like to note it somewhere so that we don't forget to bring it up. Right. And you know, it very well could be the simplest of things or in our mind, the simplest of things. Right. You know, I. We have to remember that, you know, day one, we did not have this knowledge and the, there's sometimes the agent or anybody, you know, they, they're doing this practice and it really, there's a more efficient way to be able to do it, they're not doing it the, the correct way, whatever it's going to be. But if you, if you really hone in on those details and to figure out the process that everybody is working through, I think that is game changer. So training doesn't have to be this big, big elaborate topic. I mean it can be down to what is step one. And step one in our brain may be really step 12 in all reality. So making sure that we're thinking ourselves backwards to what is legit. If nobody has ever done this before, what is it the true step one going to be? So that we can get them to exactly the place we want with as little as clicks as we can get them to do? Well, I think really like the same thing that with training is it doesn't necessarily need to be like a lecture, like you said, like PowerPoints or anything. I think that we've found that the best training is when it's open dialogue and you just think about things. You kind of throw darts at a wall until something sticks. But it's that camaraderie in between. The thing that I have enjoyed is because we do so much training and then when one of maybe like my newbie agents corrects a 30 year agent, it's one of my favorite things. But if you think about it, like think of the confidence that it gives that newbie agent that they had been trained so well that they're like something doesn't look right and they correct an agent that's been in the business that long. And I think that that has really empowered some of our agents to be like, wow, like they really are making sure we know what we're doing. And that's so true. And it's, you know, not that we have not heard enough about the NAR stuff that's going on right now. Right. But Ryan made a great point that is just so eye opening for me that this is the first time that all of us are now on the same level playing field because everything is changing for all of us. And we keep on talking to our agents like, okay, we've been talking about this for 18 plus months, right. Like, and there's people that knew nothing about it and still know nothing about it, which is scary. Scary now that you, we've given them the confidence and the education for it and everybody's on the same level playing field really. If you're applying everything and you are now running with all the knowledge and everything that you have been learning for the last however long you've been in the game, you're going to skyrocket your business and you're going to surpass these people that have been doing so well for so long just because it's, they've been in it, but now they're, they're having to start kind of over and you're already running laps around them. So I think it's really cool to be able to see that. You know, the training, trainings may not always be the fun, funnest thing for to be able to do or to attend to. Totally get that. But the being able to see from a leadership perspective, the, the light bulbs go off, the see it in action real life, they're applying it and getting the results. At the end of the day, like I think that's so rewarding to be able to help people all the way around. It's pretty freaking cool to be able to say, huh agent, you've been in it for 30 years. Look at this. I, that's an extension of me. I'm pretty proud. Yeah, definitely. Along with that, do you what kind of other. I mean obviously you have the office meeting and whatnot and other day to day trainings, but do you do any other thing? I know you do a, like a season, like a business planning retreat type of thing. Do you do any other types of training? Yeah, so we actually are utilizing an online platform so we have it for the leading side but we're, we're now applying it to the brokerage as well to where that these types of trainings we will be able to do virtually as well. Not only virtually, but make the courses to where that they'll be able to go back to. And then that rolled us into our onboarding. I've always thought, you know, onboarding was a tedious task as it is because it was so one on one. And I don't mean because of the person I'm talking that you, you come in, you hire, you recruit somebody and you have to train them and then here comes another brand new agent in a couple of weeks and now you start over again and it's one on one. And it was so daunting for me. And then from there like trying to figure out really what are they comprehending, what is going on, where are they really at on this checklist? Because they just put a nice little check. Do they really get it? So I've always been a huge advocate to try to make your trainings and checklists all virtually so you can monitor it on a high level and your entire team can monitor it. But now with our, our new Learn World system, we're applying our onboarding into there. And so we're making it into a coursework. You know, if somebody misses a meeting that there's so much, so much information that is, is so crucial in changing. Like you said, every freaking day. We're making sure that we have those little touch point quizzes, the frequently asked questions. And now we're, now what we're doing is we're honestly building a ongoing living library that then can be duplicated for the future agent with those questions too. We of course do our business planning retreat. We take a couple days to do that and I'm really big on making sure we have actionable items. Walking away from it. The business planning stuff that I've always been a part of was this is what you should do, this is what you should do. And it was like shaking the should stick at me instead. Like I want to be able to say like what do I do and what is my action plan? And so I'm walking away with some like the actual tangible task. So I try to make sure that they're walking away with a full 12 month overview of the next 12 months of what is going to go on, how they're going to change their business and grow their business. So now that we can evaluate the previous year, what went well, what didn't go well. So what do we need to alter to ensure that you're getting the results that you're actually wanting in all reality? Yes, that's for the agent, but I think that's more so for me because there for a while I had a lot of agents say like, well I'm not getting this from you, this isn't happening and pointing the fingers and now it's creating the accountability back on the agent and saying no, this is your plan that you came up with and these are the places that you did not perform because they're tangible tasks that you said you're going to do and, and we can review it and you actually didn't. So this is a you issue, not a me issue. What other trainings do we do? We do our annual review. We have a huge questionnaire that we go through more so asking a lot of questions about what they would like to see differently with the brokerage which then turns around into my side of the business planning of things on the back end too. Yeah, I mean there's tons, like, I know that there's so much more that we, we do like, like our training calendar and I mean we have a company Calendar, all of the trainings that we get from the corporate level for our level, on a community level, like there's anything that for, you know, that is come, come out for another third party. Like we're constantly pushing it. I bet you there's at least 10 to 15 training opportunities a week that somebody can to. Yeah, for real. So it, it's a lot, it's overwhelming, um, and it's like drinking from a fire hose. But the goal I think on the my side of leadership side is to be able to help agents dissect that and break it down into chunk sized pieces that they don't have to do all the trainings all at one time. But if you plan it properly and continue your professional development, you're, you're going to see tremendous results versus just shutting down and not even implementing or doing anything that you learn, right? Yeah, I think, you know, like two years ago we started doing quarterly reviews and I think that for me it was just like a really good touch point with the agents. I mean I see them every single day, but there's a point of like seeing someone every day versus sitting down for half hour and 45, you know, minutes. And so we do that basically at you know, the end of every quarter of, of each year. And it's just really good for agents to like pause and take a look at what they've done the last, you know, three, six, nine months, whatever that might be. A lot of times, you know, we maybe need to readjust goals, figure out is there an area that they are struggling with. I think it's just a really nice touch point. I appreciate that people spend the time to figure out, you know, fill out the questionnaire. One thing that you sent to us, I think maybe last year was the know your numbers form, which we could always throw that in the, the chat or the little area below the, below this so people could check into it. But I think it's an eye opener for people as far as what they've done, what is ahead and if they do have, you know, monetary numbers, which a lot of people tie things to monetary like helps them break down really like if I want to be at that number, like these are the amount of transactions I need to be doing, which equals potentially how many people I need to be talking to each week. And I think that that's just been a really good realization for people as to what they need to do to make it work. I think it's just important to stay in touch with your agents, especially if you're not in person, if you're a virtual office, you know, they can be quarterly, you know, reviews virtually as well. And then we do an annual review which is a little bit longer, it's a little bit more in depth. I remember my old brokerage, I think we did them in January and I was always confused because we're already into the new year. So I like to do mine in November for the following year because really like it's, you know, 45 days away from when we've met. And I think you need to be start like you need to be prepping for what does the next year look like. But you can't do that if you're already like a month into into the year. You can, but it's just not as helpful. So I think just, you know, staying in touch with your agents, getting a graph, you know, maybe knowing that there's something in particular that they're looking to do. You know, that we talk about training too. I just think about all the designations. You know, there's so many that are available. And so the ABR has been really big in our market. You know, with that you have to have an elective, which I think all of our agents are doing. And I think it's just really good for people to just be sponges because at some point in time you're going to need it. Yeah, absolutely. And you made a great point on the numbers. And it took me a long time to figure out to quantify and to put these KPIs key performance indicators. Like everything should break down in my opinion to a number and it should be able to be. Or a matter of fact of yes, no type of did you do it or did you not? There's no half ass or oh, I kinda. Or yeah, you know, I wrote that that goal out or whatever topic out so vague that nobody really is going to know if I even accomplish it or not. It just kind of depends on if anybody's going to question me. But you should be able to quantify everything. You should be able to drill it down to. I have the. Another spreadsheet. Imagine that the. To be able to be like what. Is the number freaking the sheets, remember? Right. What is your desired income? Right. Like what is your number that you want? And so we can put that that number and break it down to what your average commission is breaking it down to your average sales price. I mean like continuing all the way down and then be able to reverse engineer this to where. All right, cool. If you have your ratio from yes to no or no. Yes. Rather like I always say, it takes 45 questions. So 45 times asking, do you or somebody, you know, looking to buy or sell real estate to get one. Yes. So you have to go through 45 people to get one. Yes. And so if you use that ratio and work yourself backwards with what your actual number is that you're trying to go after, monetary wise, we can identify how many times, how many connections and conversations do you need to have for this ratio to be in your favor, to be able to get you your number. And when you do it that way and you can start breaking down, man, I need to talk to eight people per day. Eight, eight people per day is way easier in my mind to be able to manage than saying, oh, I want to make a $150,000. That's, that's a daunting number. That's a big number. And then the further I get into this, right, like that now it's going to be like I'm going to shut down. But if I continuously remind my agent to be able to say it's only eight conversations per day, one conversation per hour, that is pretty darn easy for them to be able to digest and then start applying how am I going to have these conversations? And even if I mess up today, I can start over tomorrow and then do my eight tomorrow. And it's just a compound effect to be able to see what that true big picture the outcome is going to be in that year if I stick to my eight people per day. Right. And I couldn't agree more. And I think even just thinking about, you know, that I think it's important too to we try to every now and then bring like guests from you know, title. I think we had somebody might have been my brother in law, but we had a lender here the other day just talking about HELOCs. Right. Because there is a role for HELOCs in real estate. And you know, not a lot of agents understand them or have had to use them or their clients have had to use them. But it can be extremely beneficial in some of these transactions. So I think whatever we can continue to do to just empower our agents and think outside the box is I think what really what they're all looking for. Sure, absolutely. And now it's the accountability aspect of it. When you sprinkle in those trainings, then you can start applying the trainings into the numbers that you know that your agents are after. And it makes this application or implementation of the training so much easier to adapt because now you as the leader, know what the goals are of your agent, you know why they're going towards those types of goals and working towards those things and the reasoning. And then now you're able to say, cool, if you continue to do this, if you go and make this social media post, you know, four times a week, look how this can impact your bottom line, right? So training is, is something that is, is so important regardless if it's one on one or if it's in a group setting. If it's virtual, you know, it does not matter. But also it can't be sporadic. It needs to be consistent. You have to actually have a plan and you have to make yourself readily available to be able to ensure that you are there to support your team and lift them up as well. Cool. Thanks for listening today. Yeah, good conversations. Tune in next time guys like subscribe and we'll talk to you soon. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please like subscribe and share with others. Stay connected for more genuine insights and strategies to boost your real estate career on Facebook or check out our website. We'll see you next time.