Leading When Everything Feels Like Chaos

[00:00:00] Mie: Most people want to do well. They do. And , if they're not doing well, it's not usually because they don't want to. And if you don't define what success is going to look like, they're gonna guess. And they're usually gonna guess wrong..

[00:00:19] Lauren: Real estate isn't just about contracts, closings, or commission splits. It's about managing chaos and learning how to lead inside of it.

[00:00:25] Mie: No one tells you that when you start and you think it's gonna be all open houses and Instagram worthy moments, and then you realize that half of your job is emotional regulation, missed calls and figuring things out on the fly.

[00:00:37] Lauren: In this episode, we're talking about all the real stuff, the things that no one teaches you in licensing class. So if you've ever felt overwhelmed

[00:00:45] Mie: or under-prepared, or like everyone else, somehow has it all figured out, trust us that they do not. But there is a better way. Let's get into it.

[00:00:54] Lauren: Hey everybody.

[00:00:54] Lauren: Welcome to the very first episode of that. So real estate, the show where we pull back the curtain on what actually happens behind the scenes in this industry.

[00:01:03] Mie: Yeah, we're not here for the fluff. We're here for what is real. From onboarding chaos to agent burnout. Late night listing drama to the classic, wait.

[00:01:10] Mie: Are we getting paid on this moment? We've seen it all.

[00:01:13] Lauren: Yes, I'm Lauren Holland, director of Team Operations at Reside Systems, lever Operations Nerd and Checklist Queen.

[00:01:20] Mie: And I am Mia Yamashita, director of team, production coach, accountability partner. , Sometimes a reluctant part-time therapist for agents all across North America.

[00:01:29] Mie: Yes,

[00:01:30] Lauren: and this podcast is our space to talk candidly about what it takes to grow a real estate business, the messy middle, the mindset, and the systems you wish someone taught you sooner.

[00:01:40] Mie: If you've ever felt like this job is harder than it should be, you are not alone and you are in the right place. All right, so let's start with this lo , what's something you wish someone had told you before getting into real estate?

[00:01:52] Lauren: Okay, so I came into real estate at 22 years old and, that real estate is 80% emotional regulation, and that goes for your clients, your team. And yourself. Business is a big conduit for personal growth. , You are part project manager. Part therapist, part negotiator, all while answering texts at maybe 9:00 PM Totally.

[00:02:17] Mie: Yeah. You know, I wish I'd known that chaos is kind of like the default setting and that success comes from learning how to lead within that. I do see this a lot where a lot of agents think that once they close a few deals that it's supposed to get easier. And you and I both know than truth. It just changes.

[00:02:32] Mie: Like you actually have to get stronger.

[00:02:34] Lauren: Yes. And the biggest myth I see is that if it feels hard, you must be doing it wrong. But that's not true.

[00:02:40] Lauren: What's often missing is structure. And without it, of course, that's going to feel hard.

[00:02:45] Mie: Exactly. You know, you're not expected to know everything, and if you don't have a plan or a process, this business is gonna burn you out really fast.

[00:02:53] Lauren: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:54] Mie: Yeah. And that is so real estate. I love it. So let's talk about leads and mistakes and let's just do a little market talk.

[00:03:02] Mie: Okay.

[00:03:03] Lauren: let's talk about the elephant in every real estate office right now. The market. Mm-hmm. Everyone that leads are bad. The market is slow.

[00:03:11] Lauren: But Mia, what's the full

[00:03:12] Mie: story? You know, honestly, not always. In many cases, it's not that the leads are bad, and I really do have this. Belief that there's no such thing as a bad lead. , There's high quality leads and low quality leads, but there's no such thing as a bad lead. It's oftentimes the follow-up is inconsistent.

[00:03:31] Mie: There's a skill set missing. You know, there just, there hasn't been, , , perseverance through that initial objection. It's not always that the leads are bad.

[00:03:39] Lauren: Yeah. And I've seen this with top agents before, , that have contacted a, like back with BoomTown.

[00:03:48] Mie: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:48] Lauren: , One of our top agents contacted a lead for five years, over a hundred times.

[00:03:52] Lauren: And within that time period, they finally went back, okay, I am now ready. You know? Mm-hmm. Lead, it's the engagement in your follow up. So, and we see this all the time in coaching teams investing heavily in lead generation, but dropping the ball on conversion.

[00:04:06] Mie: I legitimately saw this yesterday, , where I was going

[00:04:09] Mie: over, , leads with the team and they had, , within the past six months, I wanna say May no a year, the past year.

[00:04:17] Mie: Mm-hmm. , , Over 400 leads from this one specific lead source that was about $10,000 in leads. And, , over 300 of them had not been touched in over 30 days and had only one attempt on them, and they were spending thousands every month to bring 'em in. Gosh, that hurts. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That was painful.

[00:04:34] Lauren: It was a wake up call.

[00:04:35] Lauren: Yeah. And so I think you and I have talked a lot about, , having a system for your sources before. So really maybe audit those and have, when's the last time you looked at your financials, looked at, , your p and l, and do you need to cut back on anything? Now might be the time to do it. I know we're in spring, summer market when things start heating up, in most areas, but.

[00:04:54] Lauren: Do you necessarily need that $10,000 lead source or how are you auditing the database as well? Yeah,

[00:05:02] Mie: and I think that's really what it comes down to and why structure is so important. You need a workflow, you need a rhythm in your CRM, but most importantly, someone needs to keep an eye on the numbers. , for team owners when you're inspecting the database, you catch stuff like this faster than.

[00:05:17] Mie: A year later, six months later, even a month later, like 30 days could be the difference between somebody saying, I'm gonna purchase a home and I already purchased a home. , and when you are not keeping an eye on the database, when you're not looking at how many attempts have been made on this lead, what is the conversation like?

[00:05:32] Mie: Like right now, I'm instructing my team owners. Go find some pendings. They're sitting there. Go look inside of your CRM, go look at what your agents are doing. Inspect the database. I guarantee you're sitting on pendings that just have not been followed up with yet.

[00:05:44] Lauren: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So market or no market consistency is always going to win.

[00:05:49] Lauren: That's right. Awesome.

[00:05:50] Mie: Okay, well, let's, shift gears here and, , let's talk about what they don't see on high performing teams. Everyone wants a high performing team. , Lauren, how many times do you think you've heard, I want a Navy SEAL team.

[00:06:03] Lauren: Oh,

[00:06:04] Mie: all the time. I hear that all the time. , everyone wants a Navy Seal team, but they don't always see what it takes behind the scenes. So what do you think are some things that people underestimate?

[00:06:14] Lauren: there's a couple different things.

[00:06:16] Lauren: Onboarding 100%. , so many teams, , will add an agent and think, oh, they're gonna figure it out. But without a plan, a real weekly or week by week roadmap, they're going to flounder, or worse, they are going to leave. And then you start having a retention problem and start questioning yourself. And it's seriously a deep reflection on leadership.

[00:06:38] Lauren: And it's the same with your staff too.

[00:06:40] Mie: the same thing goes for the admin roles. They are not mind meters. They need systems. They need clear responsibilities. They need shared, calendars to truly thrive. , I also, Lauren, you've probably been seeing my emails on this come through you and Brooke lately on like, , , daily downloads, recaps.

[00:06:56] Mie: At the end of the day, like I'm really pushing this with our team owners. , Are you meeting with for 15 minutes and you, and protect that space? It shouldn't go beyond 15 minutes. , and it should be met every day. You guys download. What are the numbers for the day? What does my calendar look like?

[00:07:09] Mie: what are we doing? What are the pendings looking like? Like what is on our agenda? What are the projects we're working on? What are things that I need to get answers from you on right now that if I don't sit you down and get those, I'm gonna be chasing you for the next three days.

[00:07:20] Mie: Like that, 15 minute daily download should be sacred with your admin. 'cause they are not mind readers.

[00:07:26] Lauren: You just make me wanna like, give it all away and be like, okay, let's talk about structure and I know, go to the calendar. So, , just to unpack that a little more. So that is what agents have your admin or virtual assistant, send you that data. And then, , same for your admins. Like, you can do the, I think this comes from the ideal team player, the daily four daily five questions. , What success did you have today? what struggles did you have today? How did you overcome those struggles? And what's your mindset on, from a scale of one to 10?

[00:07:54] Lauren: Otherwise you can do it's okay. What a start of day email. What was on your plate today? , What'd you actually accomplish? What got moved tomorrow? Just for visibility. If you truly feel like there is a time choice or a time management issue, you can have visibility into what they're doing daily. So

[00:08:09] Mie: something just came to mind for me on that low.

[00:08:11] Mie: . When you are checking in on those projects, when you are checking in on the things that you said, Hey, , I want this done. Or if you have a driver admin, that unicorn admin that doesn't try to give you the job back, that is, you know, leading projects and you're not checking in on that.

[00:08:27] Mie: Most admins. Need you to tell them they're doing a good job. They need to know. and I'm not saying it's because they're needy, but that's how an admin person is typically wired. It's like you need some sort of, , reinforcement of like, Hey, I'm doing this work.

[00:08:40] Mie: Did you notice all the boxes I checked? You know? And so if they're gonna put a project that you say, yeah, I like that, follow up on that, because they need you to watch them.

[00:08:49] Lauren: I can relate from personal experience. I've been in the. All admin roles on a team and also like coming out of that and supporting and scaling teams and being in Reside.

[00:08:59] Lauren: You know, sun and I meet pretty much weekly and we go through, , I get this question all the time. It's like project management. How do we keep track of everything? You don't have to use the system. We use a system called Monday. You can just go into Google Sheets or Excel, however you wanna track something.

[00:09:14] Lauren: It doesn't have to cost money. And we have a task list. What's the task? Who's the owner? When's it due? What's the priority on it? And we go through it every single week and it takes us less than 30 minutes 'cause we're so dialed in

[00:09:25] Lauren: I mean, we're talking about, and I wanna highlight this because we're talking to you, team leaders, growing your team or like thinking about growing your team, and you're like,, it's a time issue. You know, Nick and me are running multiple businesses. Shout out to these guys, and they still have time to meet with us for 15 minutes, at least three days a week and an hour,

[00:09:42] Mie: Nick gives us full blown trainings on Fridays, and then Monday, Sydney and Nick meet with us , and go over, like everything we're working on.

[00:09:49] Mie: , Yeah, and it's funny because one time Suneet said in one of our meetings, like, I need to make more time. And I was like, Suneet, that's an impossible thing. You can't make more time like there's no way to do that. , and I think that's important for us to remember is that you cannot make more time.

[00:10:01] Mie: You have to choose what you're gonna do with the time you have.

[00:10:03] Lauren: John Chop Block talks about that all the time. Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.

[00:10:07] Lauren: I'm listening to that. Slowly but surely. It's so freaking good. Like,

[00:10:11] Mie: yes, Karen Hall loves that book too. One of our team owners, I love her. I met with her yesterday, but she loves that book. I, I need to read it. You're right.

[00:10:18] Lauren: Rita, I highly suggest all of you, Rita. so going back to, yeah. Team leaders or admins agents, you need to say the quiet part out loud. Here's how you win. It's not just be a team player, it's show up To the huddle. Make your 10 calls more than that. Yeah. Take the CRM hit these goals.

[00:10:37] Mie: Yeah. make your 10 contacts. Not make your 10 calls, I would say, or get your four to seven, two minute conversations.

[00:10:43] Mie: but you're right, they need a specific prescription. It needs to be simple. Give them a scoreboard. , You know, it's not just. Vibes out there and saying like, oh, it feel like we cannot feel our way into metrics. We cannot feel like when we lean on something feeling good, , or like, I feel like I did X amount of calls, there's no true clarity in that.

[00:11:00] Mie: Like, when we live in the ambiguity, everyone's gonna be confused. Most people want to do well. They do. And , if they're not doing well, it's not usually because they don't want to. And if you don't define what success is going to look like, they're gonna guess. And they're usually gonna guess wrong.

[00:11:15] Mie: Hence, I finished my website, I got my business cards made. You'd be so proud of me. I posted on social media and none of it was prospecting. So would you say celebrate the wins? I would say, celebrate the wins. Of the lead measures. Okay. you do need to celebrate lag measures, but the focus needs to be on lead measures.

[00:11:36] Mie: Yeah. That's the 1% better every day formula.

[00:11:38] Lauren: I love it. And then even the easiest way, or correct me if I'm wrong, but the easiest way to do that is pulling up your CRM in your sales meetings and going through that weekly, and who's the top three? Consistently. And on the board too, there's a way to see if people are just fudging the numbers and fudging the calls because you can look at those conversions.

[00:11:58] Lauren: But if somebody is truly number one on the leaderboard every single week and their pending counts on there, . Celebrate them every single week. It's not just, oh, the so-and-so is getting all the attention. Yeah, they're doing the activity. Yeah, they're doing it should be. Yeah. Agreed. so when agents leave teams, it's rarely, rarely about the splits.

[00:12:17] Lauren: Not saying it's not sometimes, but primarily it's going to be about confusion and lack of clarity of what they need to do.

[00:12:24] Mie: I would even throw in there too, lack of leadership. I hear this all the time. 'cause you know, my, ex is military and you never got a lot of friends in the military. They never leave the military, they leave the leadership.

[00:12:33] Mie: You know, I hear that over and over again. Yeah, Lauren, what's one system a team should implement this week? Okay.

[00:12:40] Lauren: What I would say is we talk all the time about recruiting. Great. What's next? So the next layer of that is creating a real onboarding roadmap.

[00:12:51] Lauren: I love putting together for an admin, specifically, if you're hiring a new team member or staff member, a 30, 60, 90 day training plan. So their first 30 days. What are the expectations? So you can also pull these from the job description of, okay, this is everything we need them to do. How do we teach them to do that?

[00:13:12] Lauren: And you can chunk it down into the first 30 days. This is exactly what they should be nailing. , So for an example, I'm gonna start with an admin, then move into an agent, an admin. . I just hired somebody in client success. I took their job description the first 30 days I needed her to learn from start to finish, how to onboard a client.

[00:13:31] Lauren: That's one thing. That's her 20%. Yeah. For an agent, Mia, you could probably, , say more than I can,

[00:13:38] Mie: I love what you said, and for me, I want some sort of daily checklist. I also call this like how to win the week, it's getting your two minute conversations. It's being in the CRM looking at your pipeline, doing a follow up video.

[00:13:50] Mie: You know, just keep that checklist really simple. , For me, when it comes to like what I specifically recommend every single week, it is, , add five people to the database. Meet two consultations every week. Two met consultations not set to met. , , Show up. So show up to the team meeting, show up to the call nights, et cetera.

[00:14:08] Mie: , And then get your 22 minute conversations every week. And so if you break that down daily, it is getting your four, two minute conversations. It is showing up to the huddle, to the, , team meeting, et cetera, adding one person to the database. And then you need to get to about two met consults per week.

[00:14:23] Lauren: Okay. And I really wanna highlight this 'cause you're talking about showing up and we talked about leadership. So, , in 20 20, 20 21, Most people couldn't go into an office. So let's say that you're somebody that doesn't quite have an office yet, but that's in the plan. When we're talking about showing up, there is always a way pop on.

[00:14:39] Lauren: Oh yeah. With your team. 15 minutes. every single day, you know? Yeah. Talk about wins, what's important, , or what your activity is for the day, and then go into script practice. If you're not scripting every day. What are we doing? When are we getting that, , role playing in?

[00:14:53] Mie: Yeah. They need three times a week minimum, five times a week maximum.

[00:14:56] Mie: And you know, when I first started my coaching program in Wilmington, it was in the birth of COVID and we were virtual. , We were between eight locations and two states. I had 50, 60 people on my morning call every single morning for 30 minutes at eight 30, and so it doesn't matter if you are in person or not.

[00:15:15] Mie: Now, being in person is, I love being in person. I'm all about it. Yeah. we lead generated on a Zoom together. We had our, morning meetings on a Zoom together, you know, like we did our, , , , all of our trainings on a Zoom together. I'm fully virtual training now. I, you know, I train agents across North America on Zoom every day, as you know.

[00:15:31] Mie: And so, , you can have. Community and connection even on virtual. So yeah, I agree with that there. And then I would say, , , , or I would ask Lauren, what is, , one last tip that you could give, , our listeners today?

[00:15:43] Mie: A

[00:15:43] Lauren: small but mighty tip. Leaders, answer your phone, get back to your team.

[00:15:48] Mie: Seriously, that alone can set you apart. Yeah. And remember that your brand is not just your logo, it's how you show up when no one's watching.

[00:15:56] Mie: , Be the person who answers the freaking phone.

[00:15:58] Lauren: Yeah. And we're not saying, okay, they're calling you at 10:00 PM at night. You have to answer, but you know, oh heck no.

[00:16:03] Lauren: .

[00:16:03] Lauren: So maybe have a window. Of what that looks like for you and have boundaries and communicate that to your team.

[00:16:08] Mie: So good.

[00:16:08] Lauren: All right. So that we wanted to keep it short and sweet today, just really bring the, ins and outs of the real estate industry that many people aren't actually talking about rather than, , your prescriptive, tactical, this is how you lead gen. This is how you do X, Y, z. You know, it's really about the mindset and how you regulate emotions and how you're gonna take care of yourself in that process.

[00:16:28] Mie: Yeah. And we'll be back again with more of this. But until then, keep showing up. Keep building, keep learning. We're glad that you were with us today. Yeah. '

[00:16:36] Lauren: cause real estate is hard and you don't have to do it alone. We're here for you. Amen, girl. All right. See you later. Thanks guys.