← The Millionaire Real Estate Agent | The MREA Podcast
The Millionaire Real Estate Agent | The MREA Podcast
122. The Simple Equation for a Profitable Team With Matt Miale
00:44:53
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, gang, we need your help. I need your help. In just a couple of days, I'm going to be sitting down with Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V. And we are going to be talking all things social media for real estate agents. And I want to know what you want me to ask. Head over to Instagram, herealjasonabrams and send me a direct message of exactly what you want me to ask. Gary Vee, the interview is in a couple days. Please help us out.
- [00:28]
B
As I built my real estate team and rebuilt my real estate team and rebuilt it again. And rebuilt it again. Like everybody who's ever had a real estate team, there are certain things that we constantly go back to that you have to get extraordinarily competent at in order to have a business that will, by the way, scale without you.
- [00:45]
A
Tell me exactly how to build a big, profitable real estate team.
- [00:51]
B
It's the perfect question. What most people will immediately assume they're going to sit down, they're sharpen their pencil and be like, okay, I'm ready for the blueprint, this big, complex thing. And the truth is.
- [01:05]
A
If I were to tell you that there's an equation to have an incredibly profitable, large and productive real estate team that's simple and works every time you put it into play, you'd say, jason, I don't believe it. But, gang, here's the thing. I found it. Today you're going to hear from a man who's built a team that perennially does over 500 transactions for more than 160 million in volume. They cover three different markets, Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts. They are absolute experts in bringing agents in and getting them productive. I'm talking about none other than Matt Miali. Friends, he is going to tell us exactly how to recruit real estate agents, get them into the team. But more importantly, he's going to lay out a framework that every single team owner out there should use as a checklist to figure out if they're ready to go and what they need to improve. It is nothing short of genius. Sit back and buckle up. This is Matt Mialy, and I am joined by a dear friend, Matt Miali. Matt, how are you, sir?
- [02:12]
B
Living the dream, buddy. Love it. Happy to be here.
- [02:15]
A
Well, I'm thrilled to have you. We've had to reschedule this a couple times because you are international and worldwide, but today, we have finally got you, my friend. I ask everyone the same question. How did you end up in the greatest industry in the world?
- [02:29]
B
I love the question. I love it when you ask It. And I love hearing everybody's stories. My own is probably pretty similar To a lot of people. It was a little bit by accident. There wasn't a lot of design behind it started. I grew up in New York, outside New York City. My father was a New York City firefighter. Fdny, small town called Carmel, New York.
- [02:50]
A
All right, I gotta stop you, dude. New York City firefighter, that's like a culture in a world unto its own.
- [02:57]
B
We could do a whole podcast, my friend, on the influence of growing up as the son of a New York City firefighter. That is indeed accurate, yes.
- [03:05]
A
Think back to childhood. As you think back to that exposure, what's the one or two things that you pulled from it that. That you bring into the world today?
- [03:14]
B
Well, there's no question that a huge part of how my team operates and how we operate come from the lessons learned from somebody who was a leader inside an organization like that. My father spent 32 years in FDNY, retired as a battalion chief, which is one of the top sort of brass in the department. From that organization, you see a lot of the comradery, there's culture that pervades what it means to be part of the organization. And all of those things are fascinating because my father never came home from a job where you could argue the value proposition for that job is not so great. Right. Because you could die and you have to spend nights in a firehouse away from your family. There's a whole lot of sacrifice that goes into that. But he never, ever came home and said, I wish I had another job. In fact, he loved it. He loved it every single day. And so when I think about how I've tried to design what it feels like to be part of our team and part of our organization, a lot of those core elements are part of it. So there's. There's a lot. There's a lot there to unpack.
- [04:14]
A
Was there any part of you that thought of following in his footsteps?
- [04:17]
B
Yes. In fact, I was actually offered a starting position in the New York city Fire Department. May 1, 2001, was the date that I was intended to report to probationary school, which, of course, you can do the math on that. That's roughly four months prior to 9, 11. But at the time, I was 26 years old. I was 25 years old. I was already in my first sales job, and I was living in California doing tech sales. And the way that those jobs line up, they only offer the test and offer the positions every four years, and you have to be 17 and a half to qualify to take the test. So When I was 17 years old, I was 6 months too young to take the test. Had I taken it then I'd have been appointed four years earlier. But because I was too young, I had to take the test after I graduated from college and just sort of life timing didn't play out. So but for sure there is a path where that was the outcome that would have happened for Matt Mialy. 100%.
- [05:12]
A
I always think about the multiverse and somewhere there's a Matt Mialey in the fire department.
- [05:17]
B
People that are close to me know what a huge influence that is and sort of, you know, like how I've pulled so many of those leadership lessons and principles from how an organization like that operates.
- [05:28]
A
So you head out west, you're in California, you're like Boston George out there. What's going on out there? What did you learn in that business?
- [05:35]
B
Yeah. So you know, I grew up in New York. I went to college in New Hampshire after graduating from college, lived in Boston for a little while. This is all just sort of early 2,098, 99. I'm in Boston having grown up in New England. I was in the Northeast. I was just literally looking for a change of scenery. Best way to describe it, I'm 24, 25 years old and what else is out there? So my now wife at the time my girlfriend, we weren't engaged yet. I said we should move somewhere. She said, where do you want to move? I said I don't really care. It should be a top 10 market so that I can continue my career. So it's career focused. And at the time I was in sort of national level tech sales. This was like early days of the Internet. I did a stint in radio sales. So advertising, marketing, just. And so I really said I don't care. Let's just get out of here. Let's go to, let's go to Dallas, let's go to Denver, let's go to San Francisco, let's go. And her comment to me was if we're going to move across the country, we're going to go somewhere where it's sunny all the time and there's a beach. So those of you who live in New England can relate. Those of you who've left New England can relate. So she winds up getting a job in Los Angeles. She works for lausd, the Los Angeles Unified School District. And we moved to LA and I got a career and that really kind of, to be honest, kickstarted my real estate career. Because I wound up working for a company called Network Communications Incorporated as a regional sales rep. Now, those listening that have been in the industry for a while will never know what Network Communications Incorporated is. But what you will know is the little digest size free magazines that used to pick up on the street corners called the Real Estate Book.
- [07:19]
A
Oh yeah.
- [07:19]
B
And that was the company that I worked for. And so I managed to get into a role at that company, which was a national sales rep, selling remnant inventory across 10 million magazines published every four weeks. And I would sell to brands like Home Depot or Sherwin Williams Paint that wanted to find a way to access home buyers. And this is before the Internet. So this was before. It wasn't before the Internet, but was before the advent of, you know, large scale listing websites that homebuyers would go to. And the real estate book had. They just had it locked down. That was where people went to get listings. And so I sold remnant inventory in print publications. And through the course of doing that, interestingly enough, is the very first time I met Gary Keller. I met Gary Keller because we would always have a booth at all of the national events that were in the space. And he had just written a book, maybe you've heard of it. It's called the Millionaire Real Estate Agent. And he had just written the book. In fact, I keep it right here on my desk because he handed me this book. Dude, he introduced this is in 2003. And he handed it to me.
- [08:29]
A
If you're listening in podcast, you're bombing down the highway or you're on the treadmill, you can't see the book he just held up. This is the old school yellow pages, original with the original cover, Very rare commodity.
- [08:41]
B
He handed it to me. He was working the Keller Williams booth. And this must have been the national association of RealTors conference in 2003. I was pitching remnant inventory. So I was working the trade show floor walking around pitching like the Real estate book. And what I did, I had this very, very unique job at the company. Nobody else did it. This was like leftover pages that local, local agents and local reps wouldn't sell. So they. Every, every magazine has to be an even number of pages. And in every market, sometimes they would only sell an odd number. And so there'd be a page left over and it'd be like, what do we do with it? We could just put like blank. You can't put blank space in there. So we should try to sell it. So I'm walking around and I would talk to anybody that was on the trade show floor, and sure enough, there was this young man, he happened to be named Gary Keller. And he had just written a book and he was signing books, and he handed me the book and we talked for a matter of probably 120 seconds. And he ended the conversation by saying, you should consider getting your real estate license. And had I had any sense of intelligence at that point in my life, I probably would have followed his advice. But I didn't know who I was talking to or have any context around it. And of course, I was pretty committed to the company that I was in at the time. And so it took me another couple of years before I finally went and followed his advice.
- [09:55]
A
That is great. Crazy. Of all the how I met Gary's. Yeah, that's the craziest.
- [10:01]
B
The part that's even more fascinating about it is that when I moved back to Connecticut, this company, Keller Williams Realty, was monumental nationwide. And because I worked inside the real estate industry, but not as a realtor, I was exposed to this up and coming company that was taking territory and all these people that I would meet with. Now, granted, I would sell to Coldwell Banker agents and I would sell to agents from every brand, but the Keller agents were different. They were really different back then. And so you'd meet somebody and you'd say, like, wow, these people are doing really interesting things and they're excited and they're passionate and there's an energy level. And so when I moved back to Connecticut, because we wanted to get closer to family, this is about 2004, I came back here and there was no Keller Williams here yet. And I said to my wife, we should think about opening one of those real estate companies. And of course, I wasn't the first one to do it. Somebody beat me to it. But very shortly thereafter, I saw my first Keller Williams sign, and that was what prompted me to get my license.
- [11:03]
A
Dude, that is tremendous. And today, because if you fast forward, I mean, you guys are doing 5, 600 units year in and year out, preventably above 160 million in volume. I mean, it's a giant business that you've built. So I want to switch gears and I want to understand now that I know how you got here, how you do what you do. Matt, tell me exactly how to build a big, profitable real estate team.
- [11:27]
B
Why, I love the question is that what most people will immediately assume is that they're going to sit down, they're sharpen their pencil and be like, okay, I'm ready for the blueprint. This big complex thing. And the truth is it's quite simple. It's actually about simplification, not complexity. When people ask me what we do, well, I think fundamentally what we do is we treat the business for its raw component parts. We know what actually elicits response and we focus exclusively on that. So one of the things that it's not going to sound like is, well, we have this 37 part system that's, you know, involves AI integration. And not that those things aren't valuable, but that's not actually how we've done it and been able to repeat it year after year after year. What we do is we focus on the things that matter. And at the end of the day, there's really, number one, there's only three things that you've really got to become a master of. And not just on the team side, but starting as an agent, you've got to get exceptionally good first at getting somebody to agree to meet with you. So that's, that's step number one. How do you get someone to say, yes, I'll meet with you. Someone that you've never met has to agree to meet you in a place that they've never been to talk to you about something that they know nothing about. How do you get good at that? Number two, when they say, yes, I'll meet with you, how do you get so good at whatever time they give you, if it's 60 minutes or 45 or an hour and 10, how do you get so good at the time between when that meeting starts and when it stops, that they have no other option but to say, why would I not work with this person? This is the best experience I've ever had. I talk about that like treating it like a Broadway monologue, like if you were a Broadway star. You just have to nail 45 minutes to an hour and 10 minutes. If you crush that, the only thing left is deliver whatever promises you made during that hour and 10 minutes. Like, all you've got to do is make sure that you follow through on all the stuff you said you would do. If you get good at those three things, every agent just get exceptionally good at it. Set the appointment, crush the appointment, deliver the promise. Then every day when you wake up, you know you really only have to do one of three things. You've got to sign something, which is get somebody to hire you. You've got to sell something, which is help a buyer or a seller go under contract. And if you can't do one of those things, you've got to set an appointment. That's it. And so the core, like, is simple. People say, how'd you do it? It's like, well, we talk about that every day. We talk about that one simple thing every day. How do you go and be exceptional at setting the appointment, delivering the value during the appointment, and then delivering on all the promises that you made? Now, what people then say is, okay, Matt, sounds easy in theory, but there's got to be something deeper behind it. And of course there is. Yeah, of course there's more complexity that you have to build on, but we call those the five core competencies. And so behind the real estate business that we've built, we've broken it into basically five pillars. There's five things that you have to get extraordinarily competent at in order to have a business that will, by the way, scale without you. This is like the audience that I want to speak to are those people that are saying, hey, I'm building a real estate team. And I've hit a point where I'm churning people in, and then out there, it's still all about me. I'm still the number one producer on the team. Like that constant struggle. We call that the messy middle, where a team is trying to expand beyond their own personal influence or a team lead. You have a question?
- [15:00]
A
Well, you don't tell them. Don't tell them because I know what they're thinking, Matt. They're thinking, I'm not capturing all this great stuff, gang. The good news is I am. I'm taking the notes. You don't have to take the notes. I'm doing it. If you don't get them, they come out every Thursday via email. They're a PDF. Go to MrEanotes.com that's MrEanotes.com, matt, what are the five competencies?
- [15:20]
B
So the five core competencies. So. So everything that I ever do, I look at it and say, like, there's something here that I'm repeating. I'm doing this over and over and over again, Right? And so as I built my real estate team and rebuilt my real estate team and rebuilt it again, and rebuilt it again, like everybody who's ever had a real estate team, there are certain things that we constantly go back to that are foundational in what's allowed us to continue to grow. And I'm going to do them in order because I think that what people will understand is that your real estate journey along the path of the five core competencies probably went in this order too. So whether you're a solo agent just getting started and working on your first deal, or you're somebody that's trying to break through. How do I get past 200 to 300 units? The first thing that I know you've got competence in or you have to is your customer experience. The very first thing that matters the most of all things is how does your customer experience working with you? See, what happens is when we get our first client. And I know for me, the very. I remember the first client I got. Every real estate agent does. I remember the promises I made during that meeting that I referenced earlier. I promised an ice cream social, a flappy arm waving guy in the front yard. I promised to walk the dog. I. I promised to meet the electrician. I promised that if they needed estimates for things, that I promised everything possible in order to get that listing, present that listing, appointment or that listing. And I got that listing and I sold that listing. And it was amazing. But then what I realized was as I started to get good at the appointment and get more of those appointments, I couldn't follow through on all those promises because my customer experience was very inconsistent. It wasn't the same for everybody. And so I had to start to baseline. What does it mean to work with the Miali team when somebody says yes to an appointment and goes through the entire process of saying yes to an appointment all the way through to the time that they close and then the experience after? What does it mean to do business with us? Now there's a thousand different versions of this and you've done, what, 200 episodes of MREA, so you probably can name 200 different customer experiences. My point is simply that until a team gets competent around the idea that whether it's Sally and Joe Smith or Tom and Susie, the experience has to be similar. The customer experience has to be a similar experience, irrespective of who the agent is delivering it.
- [17:44]
A
Let me push back on that because you'll have some people that'll say, look, Jason, the difference between a great transaction and a terrible transaction doesn't really matter because in the end most of them close. So in the end they closed on a house and we got paid. Case closed. You don't think of it that way?
- [18:00]
B
No, I don't think of it that way at all. Because again, I don't look at the customer relationship as a transaction. I look at it as a lifelong relationship. The customer experience is what feeds back to the original premise. A replete, repeatable, scalable, duplicatable business that consistently produces outcomes that are profitable.
- [18:17]
A
What do you say to the person who says, I don't understand why customer experience is number one. If you don't have a lead, you don't have a customer. Why isn't lead gen and how we're going to do that number one?
- [18:27]
B
Here's why customer experience comes first. Cause it's actually the thing that most agents will have to get mastery over first. So I don't know who got in the business and became an excellent lead generator before they got good at delivering a customer experience. Most agents show up to the business and the first thing they do is they figure out, I got a client. They get some client from somewhere, and then they go all in on delivering a customer experience. And then they say, shoot, I ran out of opportunities, I better figure out how to go get another one. And so it is though, the natural sequence. And the next thing that people have to figure out is, so how do you lead generate? Right? So you have some experience with a customer. If it's a great experience, you might just get lucky enough that they would say, hey, you need to call my friend, my cousin, my mom, my sister, my brother. But if not, you have to figure out how to go find someone else. Now, lead generation is probably the part of competency that offers the most flexibility and the most creativity. Because again, if we listen to all 200 episodes of the MREA podcast, we probably find 200 different versions of what lead generation looks like. My premise, of course, is that in order to build a scalable business, people need to join your team and understand what does lead generation look like here. Now, on the Mi Ali team, it's really, once again, simple. We don't do anything super complex. 85% of our business is sphere, repeat and referral business from both our database on the team and also the databases that we cultivate on behalf of our agents. So people say 85%, sphere, repeat and referral. How does that happen? It happens with a very simple database, communication plan, database growth plan, events and giveaways that we do consistently year over year. So when an agent comes to our team and they say, matt, we'd like to work on FSBOs or expireds or some alternate version of lead generation, the answer is absolutely. This, though, is the playbook that we run because we get predictable, repeatable, scalable results that produce a profitable outcome for you. So our choice was land on that. Not every team is going to choose that. Other teams would choose something different. And there's a. There's another whole episode behind how did we land on events. But that's a conversation for another day. So then the next thing that happens for, for a team is you've got a series of agents around you. You've built a model that is a customer experience. So whether it's, you know, a brand new agent on your team or an experienced agent, the customer's experiencing the business the same way. You're lead generating the same way. Which means that you have common language, you have everybody saying the same thing, people are running the same campaigns at the same time. Then what needs to happen is you have to have some kind of a production model. And by a production model, what I mean is every agent on the team has to have a similar pace and cadence. I like to use this example that I'm a bit of a sports guy. And so you think about whether it's the NFL or the NBA or the major League Baseball when you show up. There are a couple of things that every one of these professional organizations does exactly the same way. The first and most obvious is they don't let you pick your own uniform. They tell you what you're going to wear. Now you don't have to. You might say, I don't like that color or that doesn't look good on me. But still like, well, that's just how we do it here. And there's a very simple line about, about what's allowed and what's not allowed. And I think that what a lot of real estate teams fall into the trap of is allowing too much of the independent model to integrate into what should be a team model. Now the thing is, is that I believe that most real estate agents want to have a production model. They want to have clear expectations about what they do. They're asking for it. They're saying, I come here because I need accountability and I'd like to know what to do, who to call, what to say every day. But most of us get intimidated as team leaders around saying to somebody, well, this is the way we do it. So once again I've broken it down into the simple. We do something we call the four agreements on our team. And the four agreements is our production model. And it goes along with series of other things that we expect our agents to learn. But the four agreements is the simplest one. Every agent on our team is expected to show up to everything, meaning we don't host meetings or team events that are optional. Every person that I'm in business with, I expect to show up the same way that we would expect them to show up to a job if they had a regular, you know, 9 to 5 W2 job, they would need to show up. Now that doesn't mean that there's no exceptions. It doesn't mean that people don't get sick. Of course they do. But we just want our meetings to be treated the same way adults would treat them, like, hey, I can't make it today because something happened. There's a two way communication around how we treat one another.
- [23:09]
A
And what is the cadence of meetings on a standard week, on a standard month? What does it look like?
- [23:13]
B
Every single morning we have a rise up call. It starts at 8:30, and that rise up call runs typically from 8:30 to about 9:15, 9:00 clock to 9:15.
- [23:21]
A
And what happens on that?
- [23:23]
B
So Monday morning we review market stats, we go through local market stats every single Monday it's the same conversation every single Monday. Tuesdays we typically do some sort of breakout around relevant news and information that's in the market. On Wednesdays we do a deep dive into listing. On Thursdays, again, something more relevant. And I allow some of my other team leads to lead the Tuesday and Thursday calls. And then every single Friday for the last five years, we have a guest come on our call. And in fact at one point you were one of our guests, I think back in 2021. And we have a guest come on our call and we call that our leadership and personal development call. And on Fridays it's essentially driven around the concept of every person wants to be healthier, wealthier or happier. And so our guests are always talking about how do we become healthier, wealthier or happier. And then of course we mix in a lot of business professionals and real estate professionals. But that's our cadence. Every week it's about six hours worth of total time investment that we're asking for people to say yes and show up to per week. Not 40, about 6, about 6 total. You know, between everything. And then we have, we have, every week we have a mandate, we have a mastermind that we do every Friday between 12 and 1 o' clock. And then we have a series of other trainings and we do one team meeting per month, which is typically about a two hour meeting where we do business review, awards, accolades, wins and achievements, successes, things like that. It's about a 20 to 24 hour commitment in a month.
- [24:54]
A
Love it. Okay, number one, show up for everything. What's number two?
- [24:56]
B
Number two, the biggest thing that we ask our agents to do is we've got to have accountable people. It's really, really hard to run a successful business if you don't have accountable people. And so what does accountability look like? I think that's one of those trigger words that if you ask 100 people, you get 100 different answers. But for us, it just means that we report our numbers because we track what we plan to improve. And so that looks really simple. I say to people, if you want to be accountable to a goal, then let's just take losing weight, for instance. You should probably weigh yourself. That would be a thing that you might do. And maybe you might even track what your calorie consumption looks like. Like, if you wanted to be accountable to an outcome, you would track a thing that would give you a predict that would give you an outcome. And so we ask our agents, that are partners of mine, to be accountable. And we say, this is how you're going to do it. You're going to track what you plan to improve. And in our business, that's signed agreements, set appointments, and contracts written. That's it. Those are the things that we're going to track. And so we actually only need you to do it five out of seven days. And the truth is, I don't really even need you to do it all seven days. I just need you to track your numbers five out of seven days. One of the things that I've learned about accountable people is that accountable people don't like standing still for very long. And so we actually force accountability around reporting zeros also, because the truth is, more days than not, you're going to report a zero. So what that means is if you wake up on a Monday and you put in a zero, but you didn't sign anything, you didn't set anything, and you didn't sell anything, and on a Tuesday, you wake up and you put in a zero, you didn't sign, sell, or set that day by Wednesday, you might be motivated to do something different, because accountable people don't like to stand still. And so reporting as a function of our production playbook, as a function of our accountability system, forces accountable people to get into action. The third thing that we tell everybody they have to do, you'll find this to be consistent throughout all the podcast interviews that you do. You've got to engage the world. The third thing that we ask everybody to do is we say, if you want to be on the team, you must engage the world. And that's really, you know, hyperbolic and big thinking. What does that mean? What does. It just means you got to make five new friends a week. What does that mean? Make five new friends a week. Somewhere throughout the course of your week, you've got to meet someone that you've never met before and they have to at least be able to say, hey, I know that guy. If you did that five times a week and somehow got their information into your database, by the end of the year you'd have 260 additional people that say, hey, I know that guy. That doesn't mean you got their business, it doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to work with them, but it does mean that they know who you are. And that means that you have a two way form of communication that's opened up that you didn't have yesterday. So five new friends a week, everybody can do that. Everybody can make five new friends a week. And the last thing we ask every agent to do is they've got to do two consultations a week. Meaning if you're on the team at some point throughout the course of a 40 hour work week or a 50 hour work week or seven days, you've got to sit with somebody and deliver the value proposition of why they should work with you. And you got to do that at least twice a week. Because what we know is if you did that twice a week and you just did average rates of conversion by the end of the year, you're very likely to sell between 25 and 40 homes a year, which for most people at most price points is a really, really great life. And so we stand by those four agreements as our production model. And it's again, when you break it down, pretty simple. So it's, where's the complexity?
- [28:32]
A
So far, no complexity at all, gang. If you're following along at home in the five core competencies, we have to understand the client experience, we have to know how our customers are going to be treated. Then we have to agree on how we're going to generate leads, then we have to agree on our standards, which breaks down to these four simple agreements. They're going to show up, they're going to be accountable, they're going to make five friends a day, or a week rather, and then they're going to present the value that they have as a real estate agent and part of the Miali team at least twice a week.
- [29:03]
B
At least twice a week, that's it. And then what you find is if you run an organization that has simple standards like this that most people look at and go, yeah, that I could do that. Yeah, I could do that. There's not a lot of people listening to this right now. That think, I can't do that, that sounds too hard. Most people are saying, yeah, I could do that. And if the overarching premise or question is how did we build an organization that's been in business for the better part of 15 years consistently producing these kinds of results, it's by leaning on the simple, not the complex. By saying, how many people out there hear this and say, wow, that's actually something I think I could do. And we say, yeah, you can do it. And we're going to create a framework and an experience and a culture that makes it really, really easy for you to do it. Which leads me to what the next competency is. Because inevitably you can get some people to say they'll do it, but not everybody. And at some point, every team leader will reach that point where you're at an inflection point where growth becomes challenging. And we hear the term recruiting or attraction or we have to grow by agent count. You hear that a lot in the industry. I like to think of it like selection. And so you have to have some competency around your selection process. Now. Competency, what most real estate teams do, and myself included while we were in a growth phase, is you sort of wait until you bounce into somebody who raises their hand and says, hey, I like what you're doing. Is there any way that I could learn more about it? And then you commit some amount of energy to figure out if that person's going to be a good fit. And then at some point somebody says yes and wow, you've got a new agent on your team. Like most things, that's not really a scalable, predictable model. It depends on who you run into, how often, and whether or not they're willing to say yes at that moment in time. And so what we've built is actually an attraction model which we call Agent Production Academy. And Agent Production Academy once again is pretty simple. We've built an eight week try before you buy training program that any real estate agent can say yes to. And we offer that for free to the marketplace and agents that like the Miali team. And most of them do because we're pretty nice people and we work really hard and we do a great job in our market. Say, hey, I'd like to learn a little bit more about what you guys do. And we say, sure, come on by, why don't you take part in our next agent production Academy? It's free for you because you're not part of our team. You can come in, you can learn everything that we have to Offer. You can plug into all the tools and all the systems and you can see everything. We're going to open our playbook for you. And most people, once they get in, they go, well, hell, why am I going to try to do all this by myself? What does it look like if we just got into business together and we say, well, that would be the next logical question, but you've got to meet some standards in order to do that. And the first two weeks is free, but the next six weeks is a trial. And so then six weeks of our partnership starts out with testing and models and can they be somebody asking the question, would this be a partner that could adhere to our simple model of the four agreements? Could they fit our lead generation program? Are they a person that would deliver the customer value the way that we've described and expected our customers to experience working with us? And so our Agent Production Academy serves as the competent model for us to attract agents in, retain them and then onboard them to our system.
- [32:23]
A
That's brilliant. Now is that a video course or is that something presided live?
- [32:26]
B
At the moment we do it virtually and we're doing it in the, in the three states that we serve, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. So at the moment, agents that want to partner with us are able to participate in Agent Production Academy. We offer it five times a year. It's an eight week program. And again we offer. When an agent says, like I'd like to learn more about what you guys are up to, we just say, great, sign up for the class and the first two weeks you can get in. So it's been a phenomenal recruiting program for us. It's been a great. And again, it's a predictable outcome. We know that about 50% of the people that join will graduate and they graduate into the team, which is. And by the way, they graduate with a full pipeline. So it's a great value proposition for those that participate.
- [33:08]
A
Genius. What's the fifth core competency?
- [33:11]
B
The fifth core competency that every single team needs to get super clear on is what is your agent service package. So once an agent comes to you and goes through this process of becoming the best agent that you could possibly be in business with, at some point in time, there's some growth path or some opportunity that they'll be looking for. This is inevitable. And every team lead that's out there or everybody that's on a team will be saying, well, geez, Matt, I know exactly what you're saying. I've reached that point. There's an inevitable ceiling to how many rabbits you can pull out of a hat and how many tricks you can have as a team lead. And one of the things that you see as teams grow, evolve and then hit a ceiling and then have to retract and rebuild is often you've got team leaders that are saying they're running out of things to sell almost right? They're saying, I've got people on my team, they're top producers, they're amazing, they're awesome. But they've learned all my tricks and now they're coming and they're saying, how do I get a better split? How do I get more money? How do I change the economic model so that I don't have to leave and go do something else? But I don't feel like I'm getting the same level of value that I did when I initially came here. And so inside of a team you've got to have some version of a growth path. And an agent service package, meaning an agent has to be able to get things from your team that they can't get anywhere else. For us, for instance, one of the things that we offer to our top performing agents is a mentorship program where they have the opportunity to mentor young agents coming out of Agent Production Academy. And through that process they get the opportunity to share in the opportunities that those agents come develop throughout Agent Production Academy, which gives a leader on the team an opportunity to grow what they're doing inside of the team. That's a never ending conveyor belt of opportunity for them that they would never be able to recreate on their own. We also offer sales support from 10am to 8pm every single day. And so if you're a top performing agents selling 40 houses a year, you're able to get, offer writing assistance and showing support and things like that that most agents would have a hard time building on their own or it would take them a long time to do it. It's not that they wouldn't be able to just take them a long time. So the agent service package becomes the stickiness, it becomes the, the glue that keeps you in business with your top performers for a long time.
- [35:23]
A
I think it's brilliant, man. I look up at all this and you really have made it simple. I do know though, I know we have a bunch of people who are driving at 120 miles an hour in a Range Rover right now who are. My team, which is doing less business is wildly more complex than this. But I don't want to blow up what I have. But I also Know that I need to fix this. So you've reinvented a bunch of times. We all have. How would you coach the agent out there who says, I know I've overcomplicated it, but I have something today. How do I fix what I have?
- [35:55]
B
It's the perfect question. The right thing to do is look at your economics, because at the end of the day, your economics will tell you what's really working versus what's been clouded by what you think is working. And this is what I mean. When I am coaching real estate team leads, most of what I see is people doing stuff for the sake of doing something as opposed to doing stuff for the sake of making money. And not to break it down to the simple once again, but at the end of the day, we are in business because the outcome is, can we create a profitable outcome? Can we create a path for our agents to make more money and be more successful in partnership with us than without us? And can the business succeed at a higher level in partnership with those agents as well? The more complex you make it, the higher the probability that you're losing money on inefficiencies. And so look at your outcomes and really evaluate whether or not the things you're investing in are producing ROI or are they just producing activity. Usually the P and L will tell the story. Usually the person that's got a complex business is really married to the complexity because it feels good because they wake up and they have a whole lot to do. But when you can really draw a direct line between, well, you spent this money. Did it create this outcome? See, one of the reasons I figured this out and this is it was a curse in the beginning, but it's become a blessing in the business. In central Connecticut, when I started my team, our average sales price was $200,000. So for those of you nationwide who are hearing that and saying, my gosh, I don't get out of bed and go to a listing appointment for that. That was our average, which meant we were selling a lot of homes at 120 and 140, and we were selling condos even at 60 and 70,000. Because our unit economics required us to be so efficient in how we delivered the customer experience. A lead gen model, a production model, and agent attraction model. We had to get so efficient in order to squeeze enough profit out of each part of it that complexity wasn't an option. Every time I bought too many yeti mugs, I didn't make any money. Like, I wasn't allowed to do anything. I Couldn't get anything branded. I couldn't afford anything. I had to be very, very specific. So the dollar economics, the P and L created the simplistic model. It said, is this the thing that really gets us to the outcome that we're after? Which is, does it sell another house? Does this thing sell another house?
- [38:26]
A
I think it's genius. Spot on, by the way. Absolutely spot on. All right, last question for me. I know that you have people that say they can live by the four agreements, then they get in and they don't. And so I want to talk about when do you pull the plug and what does that conversation look like?
- [38:42]
B
Love it. Love it. I'm going to go top down and then bottom up. So from a top down standpoint, and this is a really, really important point, we're never at 100% compliance. So everybody out there that hears this, that's like this is the classic message from the stage. You go back, you blow everything up. We are never at 100% compliance. We never get 100% attendance. We never get 100 people doing two, two agreements. We never ever get 100%. But what we do from a top down is we track percentage and we make sure that we're moving in the right direction. So we look at our agent count and we say what percentage of our agent count showed up to 100% of the things that we offered? And if last week it was 72% and this week it was 75%, we're moving in the right direction. If that goes backwards, then we know we're moving in the wrong direction. So we track our compliance as a whole. That's our top down model for making sure that we've got adherence to the four agreements inevitably. And this is one of the beautiful things for those of you that are saying, I'd love to have standards like this, but I'm afraid of how the outcome or how it will be received. The beauty of standards is they do all the heavy lifting for you. And so I'm not sure that I've had to actually let anyone go from the team in the last seven or eight years because the culture of the team is such that everybody knows that the four agreements is the standards by which we live by. And so those that don't show up and adhere to it start to feel like an outcast without anybody ever saying it. We show the numbers, we produce them, we tell people that this is what we do, we talk about it. And so inevitably, if you're a person that doesn't report, doesn't show up, doesn't do two consultations. You don't follow the program. You kind of figure out this isn't the locker room for me. These people do things different than I do. I'm not sure it's right. I think I might need to go somewhere else. And so inevitably, most of the heavy lifting is done for you. So it's. It's hard in the beginning because you have to be the voice that's okay with the fact that you don't have 100% compliance, because you're never going to get 100% compliance. You have to know, though, that inside of the 25% that didn't show up to everything, that next week they might be your 100%. And so you're working with people to grow the organization as a whole.
- [40:59]
A
Genius, brother. Do you promise to come back on another episode and unpack how you do the database, how you do the events, and how you do the giveaways?
- [41:07]
B
100% happy to.
- [41:09]
A
Then we will let you go, my friend. I love what you're doing. I think it's absolutely brilliant. Your clarity on the industry, but more important on the individual agent experience. See, some folks get incredibly successful and then they forget or they can't relate. The idea that you've built this team to match the organic phases of a real estate agent's life and entrance into the business is not lost on me. I. I think that's your genius. If people want more of you in their head, because I know I do. How can they find you? And how can they get a steady diet of all things?
- [41:39]
B
Matt Miali Matt Mialy team on Instagram, we are posting every day snippets from our meetings, snippets from Agent Production Academy, also our YouTube channel. So lots and lots of content out there. If you plug my name in Google, there's a whole lot of stuff. And obviously always willing to take referrals. So thank you, Jason.
- [41:59]
A
Awesome. Matt, thank you. And thank you for everything you're doing for the industry. We're all grateful.
- [42:03]
B
Thank you, my friend.
- [42:05]
A
I know that you did not get all that because that guy just took off and went 100 miles an hour from start to finish. And by the way, if you didn't get it, you need to get the notes. MrEanotes.com they come out every Thursday. That's MrEanotes.com when he goes into the first five core competencies. And let's just unpack because he's 100% right. If you don't have a unified customer experience or client experience, and you can't guarantee exactly what process you're going to take to help them accomplish their goals, you're lost. And then once you have that, you need to have lead generation. How are we going to generate leads then? There has to be some sort of production model. There has to be standards. If there are no standards, then the entire place doesn't operate. The people aren't connected by a shared vision. They're certainly not connected by shared activities. And that goes right into the selection process. If you don't have a way by which to keep the right people, not anyone who can fog a mirror, but the right people coming into the business on a regular basis, you can't replace those that move on. And in order to do all those things, you have to be so crystal clear on which age and services you're going to provide that there is absolutely no question of where you're making your investments. You know, when I think about what Matt said, I'm Left with only one thing in mind. Clarity. Matt is 100% clear on what makes his business work and what makes his agents successful. He's the ultimate essentialist. He has cut out everything else, and what he's left with is one incredible equation to go grow a profitable real estate business. Go forth and do likewise. Hey gang, if you're enjoying this as much as we are, I want you to subscribe. Hit the button right now. Do it on YouTube, Amazon Music, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We also send out a newsletter at the conclusion of every show to make sure that you get the highest points in the models and systems that were discussed. So if you want to sign up, I need your name and your email address. Head over to themillionaire agent podcast.com millionaireagentpodcast.com Enter your name and your email address and every week that newsletter will be in your box. Friends, you just went on a journey. I hope that what happens between now and the next time we meet is absolutely wonderful for you. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
- [44:35]
C
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