November 10, 2023In this episode, Nick McLean & Suneet Agarwal talk about what is trending after the Inman Connect conference in Las Vegas, why you should be using AI, Jon Cheplak’s keynote message he gave at Inman, plus a deep dive into having a leaderboard, scoreboard point system, and clean financials to make data-driven decisions for your real estate team.
Episode breakdown: what Inman Connect showed about AI, leverage and team scoreboards
Suneet Agarwal had just come back from Inman Connect, where he spoke three times, when he sat down with Reside Platform co-founder Nick McLean for this episode. His talks covered AI for lead generation, leverage and ancillary services. The conversation then moved to how Nick runs scoreboards on his own team and why clean financials change the decisions a team leader makes.
Start with cheap AI tools and think big
AI dominated the Inman floor, with vendor after vendor selling AI products. Suneet’s advice was not to start by spending heavily. His own AI software budget at the time ran about 120 dollars a month, and he said ChatGPT does almost everything he and Nick need. He uses Opus (opus.pro), which is free, to cut long YouTube videos into shorts that his editors then refine.
The bigger point was scale of thinking. Once a team leader sees AI as near-free labor, the question becomes how to turn the ideas it generates into finished work through outsourcing and leverage. Nick described AI as something that compresses the time between an idea and the content that comes out of it.
You have an army of 10,000 people working for you 24/7 at the cost of 20 a month for a premium account on ChatGPT.
Suneet Agarwal
Sell more to the list you already have
Suneet’s ancillary services talk started from a simple constraint. A brokerage or team business mostly grows by selling more houses. His answer is to bolt other services onto the core business and offer them to the existing database. He has a list of 120,000 leads, and he named mortgage, solar, insurance and property management as examples of what a team could offer it.
He framed leverage the same way. Inman billed him as the king of VAs, but he told the room that leverage also means hiring strong executives in the US. That combination is what lets him run several organizations and still travel.
Stay open for business with a standing hiring ad
Nick learned early as a solo agent to ask what his business hours were. If an agent doesn’t answer the phone or isn’t running marketing to attract sellers, that agent isn’t open. He applies the same test to teams. A team should keep a hiring ad running all the time, not only when it needs agents, yet he said some teams only advertise part of the year.
He shared a call from a friend who leads a highly productive 10-agent team and had just hired two agents. Nick pointed out that the friend had grown the business by 20 percent with those two hires.
This business is hard enough, it’s competitive enough that you can’t be hiding behind a laptop or avoiding the industry and thinking that business is going to come your way. That’s not how business works.
Nick McLean
Put the numbers on a scoreboard and keep it there
Nick once heard that his agents walked out of meetings telling each other not to worry, because he would have a new idea next week. It showed him the problem was changing direction too often. He now favors a few accountability exercises, such as self-directed work groups and feedback loops, that run around six weeks.
About 90 days before recording, he started emailing every agent their numbers from Follow Up Boss every Friday. He got a lot of pushback, including agents who called it micromanagement. He told each of them it would happen every Friday and would not stop. His team then had its best month of the year. In his view you can’t motivate people or do the work for them, so the job is to direct their focus.
The hosts walked through the Follow Up Boss point system behind the leaderboard. An appointment earns 500 points, a call of two minutes or longer earns 100, a call attempt 10, a text two and an email one. They recommend a standard of 12,000 points a month, and they suggested turning off batch emailing so agents can’t inflate their scores. Call length is a quality signal too. In the hosts’ experience, a call under two minutes rarely went well. When one of his agents said she was motivated by sales rankings rather than points, he simply ran both boards.
You can’t make people motivated, you can’t do the work for them, you can only create an environment in which they could choose to be productive.
Nick McLean
Make spending decisions from clean books
Nick admitted to past decisions made on an emotional feeling that he was losing money, when he wasn’t, which led him to overreact and cut too much. Other times he thought things were going well and was overspending. Clean books let a leader decide from data instead.
The hosts urged leaders to run a business bank account and business credit cards, not personal ones. Nick tied it to delegation. A leader who doesn’t know the numbers will never trust staff with a card. His top employees now carry cards with limits, need authorization above a set amount, and his accountant flags anything unusual, such as office supplies jumping from about 600 dollars a month to 12,000.
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Start with low-cost AI tools like ChatGPT and put your energy into executing the ideas, not buying more software.
- Look at the database you already own and ask what other services you could offer it.
- Keep a hiring ad running all year so your team is always open for business.
- Pick one or two accountability exercises and hold them for about six weeks instead of rolling out a new idea every meeting.
- Send agents their numbers on a fixed day every week, and set a clear monthly points standard they can see.
- Separate business and personal accounts so you can make decisions from data and delegate spending with limits.
