Do you want to know how you can get three new agents and three new profit centers with 10 simple steps? In this video, we’re going to give you an inside look at the Broker Challenge, a 3-day event to help broker owners accelerate their business. Join us as we walk through the 10 steps of recruiting so you can apply these same principles to your business for ultimate success.

If You’re Not Recruiting, You’re Broke

Long Doan is one of the top CEOs in the independent brokerage space. He runs a company called Realty Group that currently has over 560 agents. They’re very involved in generating traffic and leads for their agents and own a ton of ancillary businesses. One of the most important aspects of the business is recruiting—because if you’re not recruiting, you’re broke. We don’t want to be broke; we want to be brokers.

The Realty Group is one of the fastest-growing real estate companies. The reason they’re growing fast so fast is by recruiting—with the help of actively using Sweet Assist’s platform.

Most broker owners or team leaders are the CEOs of their own companies. People are their business, and your main focus should be human capital accumulation or talent acquisition. Getting buyer’s or seller’s agents, broker partners, spouses, friends, and acquaintances should be on your daily schedule. If you look at your calendar right now and don’t have at least an hour to block off every day to grow your company for the coming week, you might as well just be an agent and produce.

According to the dictionary, human capital is the collective skills, knowledge, or other intangible assets that you can use for your company. This includes habits, knowledge, social personality, and everything that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet but is a huge asset for your company. The human capital you have, the more you will grow.

10 Steps To Successul Recruiting

As the CEO of your business, recruiting should be your top priority. The word “recruiting” comes from a Latin word referring to growth. If you’re not dedicating money, time, system, process, technology, people, and other resources to recruiting, you need to reallocate and evaluate your business.

While recruiting is an art that’s often learned through time and experience, there are 10 steps that can help you.

• Step 1: Know who you are before you start recruiting. What is your company is all about?
• Step 2: Identify who you want. You want to be in good alignment with whoever you’re recruiting. You don’t want to bring on an agent only to have them leave you in a couple of months or a year. You’re going to waste a lot of time, and the acquisition cost of an agent is not cheap. When you bring them on to retain them, you don’t want to lose them before you actually become profitable.
• Step 3: Once you complete these steps, you can then craft your unique recruiting proposition. Why should they be with you instead of somebody else?
• Step 4: Identify and acquire the target audience of the agent you want to go after. You don’t want to go after every single agent in your market, because they’re not all going to be a good fit for you. You’re just wasting your time.
• Step 5: Create an omnipresence with a marketing campaign. The more they see you out there, you can stack and layer.
• Step 6: Get the appointment. This is what most people struggle with if they haven’t done steps 1-5. The previous steps will help you talk to somebody about your company.
• Step 7: Your meeting and presentation. What should you be saying and doing to make sure that you can get them to join your team?
• Step 8: Do follow-up campaigns. You need to talk to them and follow up so you can hopefully get a deal.
• Step 9: If they say yes to joining you, next is the onboarding process. What does your onboarding process look like? It’s a honeymoon period, and you want to make sure they’re very happy.
• Step 10: This step is extremely important: if they’re very happy with you, you can get some social proof through video.

Long Doan’s Journey

An important part of creating a successful business is identifying your “why.” One of the speakers at the Broker Challenge was Long Doan from Vietnam. He was known as one of the “Boat People” that came from Vietnam to America after the war. Sent alone on a small boat at just 13 years old, Doan has a 50/50 chance of survival.

There was a moment that defined him in the refugee camp, sitting on the beach, when he was 13 years old—and he didn’t realize it until he was 30. Knowing who you are and your “why” is a pretty important journey. According to Doan, you’ll know “your” why when it hits you. You’ll get very emotional, you’ll cry, you’ll know it.

However, there’s a difference between a reason and a “why.” Doan wants to make more money to take care of my family; that’s a reason. But what is your mission? What are you all about? Doan’s is because of where he came from. He’s very passionate about giving back and paying it forward. He loves helping people and in the people business, if you help people, money will come.

Doan’s “why” is that he never wants anyone to feel the way he did that night on that beach when he was 13 years old. When he finally made it to a refugee camp—which was nicknamed “Hell Island”—it was considered to be the most heavily populated place on Earth at that time. He was one of 40,000 people in an area the size of a football field. He felt helpless, hopeless, and didn’t know what to do.

Creating The Right Ecosystem

In 2009, Doan opened Realty Group.  He was an active producing broker, closing 1,000 transactions. In his first four years, he did a lot of foreclosures. In 2014 when he and Mike became partners, they decided to grow the brokerage together. Their vision is was to be the brokers they wish they had when they were agents.

That was step one of their success in recruiting: know who you are. Step two is understanding that you have an ecosystem. This is who you surround yourself with. An ecosystem is not linear; so who’s going to be inside your circle? Who is in alignment with you? At Realty Group, they’re not looking to address just anyone, and they’re not right for everybody. This is because they have an ecosystem, and they only want to add the right people inside their circle that aligns with them.

The reason for this is called the “culture code.” If you haven’t read the book, there are three reasons why people join your organization.

1. They want to feel safe when they’re with you. They want to know you will not take advantage of them, cheat them, or work them to death without pay.
2. They want to feel connected to you. This is why Doan is very clear on his story; if they feel connected with Realty Group and identify with the company as humans and people, they’re more likely to join.
3. They have a shared future or a shared vision. When people join you, are you going to lead them to where they want to go? This is all about alignment. If they’re coming to you and you’re not going where they should be going, why would they want to stay?

Your Core Values

The third step of successful recruiting is to know your core value. This includes knowing your unique recruiting propositions. Being unique or different is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities that a company can do. Instead of value creation, you want to have value innovation. Be innovative and different in your market, and then you will have no competition.

Whatever is unique about you and your business, that’s what you need to know and learn. Why should an agent switch from their current broker to another team to be with you? What makes you a better option than what they have right now? Can you articulate that in your elevator speech? An elevator speech is if someone is in the elevator with you for too long and asks what you do for work. You probably only have a minute to tell them; what do you say?

Realty Group is not looking to add just anyone to their team, and they’re not right for everyone. But if you are serious about not just surviving but thriving in this ever-fast-changing market, their agents are averaging a 104% increase in their first year with the team. Let them know if you want to meet, and they’ll see if you’re the right fit—and that’s the perfect example of an elevator speech.

Going After The Right Audience

The fourth step is knowing who you want and going after your right audience. There are different buckets of audience to go after. The first audience is geographical.

For some reason, agents want to have an office within 15 to 30 minutes from where they live. Even though they come to the office probably once or twice a year, they still want to know that there’s an office nearby that they can call “the office.” Because of COVID, many people may be doing more virtual work. That’s okay; just know that if you want to recruit high profile, high producing productive agents with teams, they like to have an office that they can call their office.

The other bucket to go after is demographics. Depending on age and years of experience, certain value propositions will resonate with them more than others. The third bucket to go after is production. Whether 0-6, 6-12, 12-24, 24-36, or 36 plus, you need to know who your audience is to create the right value proposition for them. This will give them a reason to want to join your team.

Another bucket audience to go after is the model. The model you compete within a market—whether it’s a split model, a flat fee model, a two model, or just brands like kW, REMAX, Coldwell, ESP, or Redfin. These are all of the things you need to take into consideration in your recruiting process.

Finding Your People And Upstream Marketing

So how do you go find these people when you know the audience you want to target? There are a few different ways. You can use the MLS, broker metrics, or MarketView Broker like Realty Group does. If you have ShowingTime in your market, you probably have MarketView Broker.

This program is one of the best because it also shows the agent’s home address. You can then can send mail to their home versus their brokerage, where the broker will just throw all of your postcards and mailers away. When Realty Group opens an office, they also target everyone within a 15 to 20-minute radius.

The next step is upstream marketing. In the people business, you need to start nurturing relationships and play the long game. You might get lucky if an agent is pissed off at their broker and want to make a change. For the most part, however, you need to nurture them. An easy way to remember how to do this is with A.R.T of nurturing relationships.

A stands for aspiration, which is high up in the funnel. They’re thinking about maybe moving someday but they’re happy where they are.  You might be just checking out what’s out there and seeing what’s better than you. T is transactional. They’re looking to move right now, and they need to find a broker. So by the time you come along, if you didn’t do the first step, they won’t have even know who you are.

Upstream marketing is named because it focuses on going before they need you: right upstream. To do this, Realty Group uses a stack and layer campaign. Some people might resonate better through advertising, like a postcard mailer, while others prefer social media, email, or text. The last step is omnipresent advertising so people know who you are; if you do this, you’ll have success.

Initiate The Meeting

The next step is to initiate the meeting. Most people just make a random call—which even Doan used to do that when he first started. It didn’t work well for him, so now Realty Group hires an inside sales agent. They make the call to set up appointments, and many of the meetings come through referrals.

Referrals come from people out in your market and those who know who you are. Realty Group has a great referral program where they give away a convertible BMW every year. If a person refers somebody and they keep the appointment, that name goes in a drawing. Every year they then draw for the BMW.

Once an appointment is scheduled, 9 out of 10 will say they’re not interested and are happy where they are. You can then switch to the networking pitch. For example, Realty Group’s networking script would say, “I understand. You should meet with Long because he started Realty Group, has traveled around the country to speak, and loves to share and help other people. In 30 minutes or an hour of meeting with him, you’re going to have some great nuggets to take away to help grow your business. You may not be a good fit for Realty Group anyway, and he’s not looking to address anybody. He just loves to meet people.”

Once that meeting is scheduled, it gives Doan an hour or so to talk to them. Using tips from the book The Seven Levels Of Communication, he always tries to drive them to the office—as the office is like a buying sign. If not, choose a neutral location like a coffee shop or restaurant. Doan once used the same Starbucks for five back-to-back meetings. He and his team also use a calendar—either Calendly or ScheduleOnce—to let people know when meetings are available.

Meeting Your Prospect

The next step is the actual meeting. It’s important to have a system and process set up. If you’re a CEO, because again, you’re probably very busy. However, success is the biggest enemy of growth. If you’re doing really well in production, you probably are so busy growing your brokerage that you’re neglecting these meetings. You have to put time into it.

Here’s how Realty Group does it. Using ScheduleOnce, they get a reminder via text one hour before the meeting. This will include the location of the meeting and a link to cancel or reschedule. You also want to meet where you’re used to meeting, as this gives you an advantage. You know where parking is and can get there early. Most brokers use the same Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, or restaurant when not meeting at the office. When you walk in, the barista will know you and your order—and impress the person you’re meeting that everybody knows you

If they come to your office, make them wait for at least three to five minutes. In the waiting area, you might have a magazine article, awards, and other things around that show you’re a big deal. It can even intimidate them, and they’ll want to impress you and sell themselves to show you they’re worth your time. You can also set the expectation; let them know you only have 60 minutes need to set an alarm so you don’t go over. Then I set my alarm for 45 minutes—and here’s why.

Structuring Your Time

For the first 45 minutes, Doan uses the F.R.O.G method from the Seven Levels of Communication. This includes talking about Family, Recreation, Occupation, and Goals. F.O.R.D is another option, with discussing dreams instead of goals.

When a meeting is confirmed, the person might send you links to their social media or website. In 30 seconds, you can find out that they love to coach their kid’s baseball team, they grew up in Minneapolis, or they love to sail. Doan also used MarketView Report to let him know exactly what the person is doing—including how many deals they’ve closed and in what cities. This gives an idea of the overall trend of an agent’s business pattern. This allows him to go into a meeting with all the intel needed.

Because he knows where they live, he can talk about the area and make more conversation. This rolls into family life, recreation, and what they do for fun. Next is occupation, which will be the real estate business. You can ask them what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what goals they have for the next 12 to 18 months. All of this allows you to get more information so you can prioritize their needs by the time you get to your pitch. Sharing information back also helps build rapport.

When the 45 minutes is up—and if you have not had the chance already—Doan shares how Realty Group is set up. Because he hasn’t tried to recruit them for the first 45 minutes, they’ve already let their walls down, feel comfortable, trust you, and like you. He lets them know there are only 15 minutes left, and he wants to use their time wisely. Launching into a presentation for about 10 minutes, he can then share how his business works and why he’d love to have them join.

The Platinum Rule

For the presentation, Doan goes with what he calls the Platinum Rule. Most people know about the Golden Rule: do unto others as you want them to do to you. The Platinum rule says, “do what they want to get done, not what you want to do.” What you think is good for you may not be good for them.

By going through the whole presentation with them, you can find out what Platinum Rule you should apply. A closing statement includes a question at the end of the meeting. Doan asks, “On a scale of  1-10, where are you at right now with your company?” Unless it’s their own brokerage, the answers average from 5-8. He then asks what it would take for them to be at a 10, and he’ll then see if Realty Group can offer that for them.

By that time in the conversation, Doan is at a 50% conversion rate when meeting with anybody. In January, Realty Group onboarded 36 agents just in Minnesota. All Doan does is the meetings; he doesn’t do the marketing, appointment setting, confirmation, or follow-up. He frees himself up only for recruiting.

The Transition Plan And Broker Breakup

At this point in the meeting, Doan will talk about a transition plan and the broker breakup. The transition plan enables him to share how easy it is to transition to Realty Group. They have a 94-point checklist to transition agents to their company.

He also talks to them about the broker breakup. He tries to coach them for what’s to come, especially with a productive agent. For example, if you try to break up with your broker, they’re going to try to talk you out of it. If you’ve ever broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend in the past or gone through a divorce, the other side will try to compromise. They’ll promise you improvements, but a couple of months later it will be back to where it was.

A broker might say they’ll give an agent a higher cut or more leads. But if that’s the case, why didn’t they give it to you before? Doan always preps agents for this in the meeting and encourages them not to burn any bridges. He gives them a courtesy heads up that the easiest way is to let Realty Group transfer them. They can then give the broker a text, call, email, or meet in person to thank them for everything they’ve done. That way, they’ve already transferred before they do the broker breakup.

The Interval Hour

The next step is the interval hour. After the meeting, Doan lets them know he’ll send an email recap of everything they talked about. He sends four emails out and copies his team, and that’s the only thing he does after every meeting.

One email is called the transfer license email, sent to the person he met and his team. This is so they know to execute on that drip campaign. After initial greetings, he tells them the team is going to follow up and help them with their plan. The team will then start the transferring process. The second email is a follow-up meeting email. Everything’s almost the same except for the subject line, and Doan will also recap everything about Realty Group. He’ll let them know the team will reach out to schedule a follow-up appointment to chat more and see if it’s a good fit.

The third email is called a thank you email. This is when it wasn’t a good fit or they didn’t want to move from their brokerage. Doan still sends them everything that Realty Group has to offer because you never know what could happen in the future. He also asks them to refer anybody they know that’s looking for a place like Realty Group. Through drip campaigns for free training events or fun follow-ups, the team still keeps in touch.

The very last email—which Doan only sends out a handful time—is called “let’s keep in touch.” That email is put into the “Do not solicit ever again” list. It’s when it’s not a good fit, but you still want to keep referrals open in the future.

Nesting And Greeting Message

The next step is nesting. When the person says they want to transfer, we follow up with them on a transition plan. This includes preonboarding, onboarding, and post onboarding. This is for people who said yes to step nine. In this market, those people do about 24 deals or more a year, which is two a month on average. That means they get the VIP plan for a  really smooth transition.

The very last step is called the greeting message, or social proof. After onboarding, agents are in a honeymoon period. They’re getting calls, inquiries, and are the most excited and impressed with their new brokerage at this stage. The last of the recruiting steps is to capture the testimonial and target the office or model they came from.

For a really influential agent, they target the entire market and make the announcement as soon as they make the move. For example, Realty Group just had an agent that came from kW, doing 60 deals last year. They targeted his office with a video, directing those that wanted to learn more to contact them. This was a great way to get more agents to make the transition.

Questions And Answers

As you can see, these 10 steps are essential for successful recruiting. For our Broker Challenge seminar, there were many brokers who had questions—and here we’ll go over them.

Q: What are some of the biggest challenges to recruiting?

A: One challenge is putting together your own elevator speech to let someone know why they should sit down and talk to you. To craft an elevator speech, it’s important to have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Even if you screw up on the first few, keep tweaking the elevator speech until you get better. It doesn’t have to be perfect; you just need to go up to the 15^th floor and try it.

Q: What system do you use for follow-up?

A: Realty Group used Follow Up Boss as a CRM. However, each person has to have a separate Follow Up Boss account because when the person becomes one of your agents, they cannot also become a customer. They also use Brokerkit, which helps them track and grip people as well.

For outhouse follow-up, they also use call assistance from the Philippines. All they do every day is make about 150 to 160 calls from the list we give them, and they have 3040 compensation. This results in an average of two to three appointments a day.

Realty Group’s growth started to expand when they layered both in-house and outhouse systems together. They’ve had success with both, but when done in-house they set them up on a close to minimum wage base plus $100 per recruit that they get. With recruiting about 40 agents a month, that that money starts to stack up for them. Along with people making the dials, you can target agents online through ads. That way, when an agent gets a call, they already know about the company’s presence.

Q: How does the car giveaway work?

A: When people hear that Realty Group gives away a Mercedes every year, their minds explode. This is because they assume that every year the company is writing a check for $50,0000 and giving someone a paid-off car. However, this is not the case.

The car giveaway is structured as a three-year lease, and the winner has the lease under their name. If they ever leave the company, they have to make the payments themselves—and this helps with retention. They don’t want a winner to leave the company after getting the lease. At a cost of about $750 a month, 3 years sounds like a lot. But if the average agent brings in $6,800 a year per agent brought to the brokerage, three to four agents pay for the vehicle in that three years.

To put it in perspective, if you give a car away every year, the maximum cost per month by the time you give away the fourth one is $2,250 per month. Is it worth $2,250 a month to recruit 10, 50, or 100 agents? Realty Group got about 170 referrals last year, and the car giveaway creates a huge buzz and makes great content. It’s definitely worth the cost.

Q: What is the minimum number of referrals needed to qualify for the car?

A: Realty Group doesn’t have a minimum. The first year they offered it, they wanted to have at least 30 people referred and joined for the contest to become activated—and they hit their goal. Since then, it’s never been an issue. Every single time an agent refers an agent, their name goes into the hat that many times. When pulling the winner in front of everyone, it’s simply the luck of the draw.

Q: What time of the year is the car giveaway?

The contest lasts for the whole calendar year from January 1 to December 31. They then give it away at a party in January or February—although the winner usually won’t want a convertible until spring. They’ll get the car in April or May, which is accompanied by a huge marketing campaign. This works great because summer is not high for recruiting season, and the campaign keeps the ball rolling.

Another option is to give the car away at the yearly holiday party. This is a great option for recruiting, as everyone’s having fun, taking photos, and enjoying an impressive and festive environment. By making sure the entrants have to be present to win, you can get more engagement and participation in the event.

Q: How do you budget for your acquisition costs?

A: It costs about $500 per agent to bring on, and that’s what Realty Group budgets for. On average, you’ll want to spend 10% of your budget marketing for what you want to bring in revenue. They know they’ll get $6,800 per agent, so they would budget $680. If they liked the agent and they join, the first deal they close would result in $500 going to the agent who referred them.

Q: How do you pick your team to get referrals?

A: Realty Group uses a virtual assistant from the Philippines. It’s important to have someone who can speak good enough English so they’re not getting shut down right away. They simply get on the phone, call the list, and work the script. She makes 160 calls and sets two or three appointments a day.

It’s also important to find the right people for your team. If you want to recruit, you need to have the right recruiters. If you want to keep people, you need to have the right people on your agent team, concierge team, or customer service team.

Q: How do you avoid conflict with competing brokerages when recruiting in the marketplace?

A: Conflict or frustration is part of the game. At times, it might not be comfortable. All brokers lose agents, includes Realty Group. A good brokerage will hug a leaving agent on the way out and let them know there’s still a spot for them if they decide to come back. Many other brokerages will let that conflict take control of their emotions, and they’ll get mad or argue with the agent when they’re leaving. But if you do that, they’ll never want to go back to the brokerage that made them feel like a jerk for leaving.

Conflict is going to be there; it’s just how you handle it. Handling it with class and taking the high road is the best option. It’s all about alignment, and you can thank them for the journey for the time your goals coincided. Remember, the lifetime of an agent with a brokerage is usually about two years. If you do a good job to retain them longer than that—which Realty Group does—then that’s awesome.

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