Dean Cottrill, President of T3 Sixty’s Brokerage Consulting Division

About this podcast

Your brokerage is a magnet. In this episode of the REAL with MoxiWorks podcast, listen as Dean Cottrill, real estate pro and President of T3 Sixty’s Brokerage Consulting Division and Chris Gunn, Director of Account Management at MoxiWorks give their two cents on how to create a foundation that will attract the key elements your brokerage needs to be successful. They’ll dive deep into the importance of assessing your competitive landscape, creating a compelling value proposition, forming a strategic roadmap, driving leadership that attracts top-tier talent, and SO much more!

TRANSCRIPT

Christopher Gunn: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. I’m Christopher Gunn, Director of Account Management here at MoxiWorks, and I’m joined today by Dean Cottrill, the President of T3 Sixty’s Brokerage Consulting Division. Dean, thanks for taking the time to come on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Dean Cottrill: You bet, Chris. Good to be here.

CG: Right on. Well I’d like to get an introduction for you, for everybody that’s listening for the first time or for our listeners that are coming back. Could you give me a quick rundown on how you ended up in real estate and what your day to day looks like at T3 Sixty?

DC: You bet. So I came out of college with an accounting degree years ago, back in 1988, I’m dating myself here, and quickly realized accounting wasn’t for me. I went to a night class, got out of community college, got a real estate license, started investing in real estate and then selling,I sold for eight years actively right outside of Washington DC. So I learned the business, got my GRI, CRS, associate brokerage license, and then I moved into leadership, ran sales offices for some of the largest organizations in the country for Weichert Realtors, Long and Foster. And I moved to NRT’s operation, that’s the company owned stores for Realogy. I ran the Coldwell Banker residential brokerage operation in the mid Atlantic which is DC, Virginia and Maryland mostly. And then I, my last role with them was what’s called a group president. I oversaw operations in Georgia, the Carolinas and the mid Atlantic area. It’s about 4,000 agents doing about 10 billion dollars in sales.

CG: Okay, so you’ve got a few transactions under your belt and a few war stories to tell.

DC: Yeah, a few! And I’ve moved into consulting. So my current role is with T3 Sixty, I’m the president of our brokerage consulting division. I work with broker owners across Canada and the United States to help them run more efficient, more profitable organizations.

CG: How did you make that transition from working in the brokerage to outside consulting at T3 Sixty? How did that happen?

DC: It happened easily. Basically when I left NRT moving into consulting because of the experiences I’ve had, it enabled me to ­– if you broke out the region I was running from NRT, for example, it was in the largest, top 10 organizations in real estate in the country – so it was a multifaceted organization. So now working in a consulting way with broker owners, it allows me to give them some insight from a perspective that they haven’t received or haven’t got to that level or size yet. So it allows me to give them some direction from where I’ve been through the growth of the managing offices and regions and companies. So it was an easy transition for me. It’s still, it’s helping people. It really kind of goes down, when I was an agent, I helped buyers and sellers buy and sell houses. I went into management, I helped agents run more profitable businesses. And then when you move into regional and president roles, you do the same thing. You help leaders become better leaders. And you also still have insight and support to agents but you typically, it’s not, it’s more of the day to day you do at those other levels.

CG: Okay, and so now that you’re in that position to work with brokerages on, on what they’re going to do to be more successful and how they’re going to move the needle in their businesses –

DC: Yeah.

CG: – How are you helping them innovate and stay competitive and also keep that margin up for themselves? A lot of the space, especially around technology is really crowded. There’s a lot of noise. So how do you help them cut through that noise and identify the things that are, that are worth taking a look at that are worth putting their time, effort, resources, and energy into?

DC: Well, it’s a great question. And one of the things too, we also, and I work with large teams, so that’s; large teams, really are companies within companies in today’s world. So to answer your question, there is noise. That’s exactly the language I use too, Chris. It’s the noise of the business and running a brokerage. What we encourage and what I encourage brokers to do is really take a step back and do a really deep competitive assessment of their marketplace. Every market is different. There are a lot of similarities as I ran the operation on the East coast that something in Georgia, you know, was a different market than it was in Washington, DC for example.

CG: Mm-Hmm.

DC: There are though a lot of similarities in running a brokerage. You have a lot of unique and different models compensation charges to the public compensation to agents, so you got a lot of moving pieces. So what we encourage everyone to do is take a step back, do a competitive landscape, look at your competitors. Understand what they’re offering, understand then what you offer cause that allows the brokers to have a more clear and concise, and frankly, a more compelling value proposition as they talk to their agents for retention purposes and also for recruiting purposes. That competitive assessment actually allows brokers to feel a lot more confident about who they are cause they, right now, most brokers have a gut feel of where they fit in the competitive landscape, but when they do a real deep dive into the competitors, talking about ownership space, meaning their physical space, if they have any…also looking at their compensation, how do they pay agents, everything, from soup to nuts of a competitor and what do you offer as a brokerage and how does it compare? That allows brokers to have a real clear understanding and frankly, it allows them to pin their ears back and then go to work and build their brokerage much more successfully than just guessing about the competitors. And that includes technology. So that deep dive also looks at technology.. What are the offerings? And then you also could potentially see some places that they’re missing. You know, they don’t have…everybody doesn’t have everything. So it’s good to get a sense of what everybody is offering and then how do you fit in that mix?

CG: Well, something that you said really jumped out to me, it was a clear, concise understanding of what their value prop is. And so I want to dive a little bit deeper into that. Why do you think having that clarity and being able to…to sort of boil that down to something is important? Because that’s, I, I’ve noticed that in our clients that we interact with in the industry, that everybody has a really hard time sort of wrapping their arms all the way around the value prop, not just, not of their brokerage so much, but of the services and support that they provide their agents, like really making that digestible for agents, managers, regional directors within an organization seems like it’s a lot harder to do than it is to talk about your value prop to the public. And so, talk to me a little bit about that.

DC: Clarity is like, it’s extremely important in life, in personal life, in business to have clarity of what, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. And so in talking about having a clear and concise and then move it into a compelling value proposition, it’s very important to attracting and retaining agents and your business. And think of that, it includes buyers and sellers as an agent, and includes agents as a leader that you’re going to grow your brokerage, you’re gonna retain the talent that you have, you’re going to attract more talent. Think of any top ­– one of the things in working with leaders, if leaders have, well ­– everyone’s a magnet. I guess that’s probably a better way for me to describe it, Chris. And as I throw it out, everyone’s a magnet, meaning we attract certain things to us by who we are individually, how we push ourselves. And then also we also repel as a magnet does. We repel certain things as well, including people. So, the best organizations, I can take different organizations, same name, same brands, same tools, same systems and you can look in one place in the, in the country or North America. And it’s killing it and doing phenomenally well has a huge market share. And you can take the same model, same brands, same everything tools, and you put it in another market and it’s not doing…it’s barely doing well at all. if at all. It’s maybe doing very poorly, and the difference is almost always leadership.

CG: It’s funny that you said that because we see that too, where people will have almost identical tech stacks, identical agent types in the same market, actually like brokerages that have offices across the street from each other. And ones doing an absolutely amazing and the others having a really hard time. What is the big difference? Is it clarity or is it something else?

DC: Well, it’s passion. I think, you know, when you talk about clarity, when someone has clarity on who they want to be in the world, they want to live their life and they want to push themselves to be better…that person is a magnet for talent, for people that want to do the same in their lives. They want to be around someone who pushes them, who helps them be better and stronger, smarter, faster, whatever it might be. So, leaders is, in my experience in working with you know at the end there, we had over 70 locations, so you had 70 leaders in offices and regionals and presidents. So you see a whole dynamic of different leadership. And the people that, in my experience, the people that push themselves to be the best they can be will attract talent, will attract managers, will attract their regional president role, they’ll attract as a manager, they’ll attract talent as agents. So the people that push themselves typically have an understanding of – pushing themselves meaning, you know, they have a morning routine, for example that gets them going in a positive, they’re optimistic, they have a positive mindset – so, you know, things that we’ve heard about forever. It’s not rocket science in that if you go about having a leader who is pushing themselves to be the best they can be, they’re going to attract others to be with them and carry that flag and run. And that, that excitement that comes from that, that energy, that positive energy that comes from that, that leader is going to attract great talent. It’s going to make good things happen. One of the things I always say, Chris, is success leaves clues and I find quite a few successful people ­_­– you know, real estate typically is the second, third, fourth different career for someone very rarely. I mean, I worked for six months as an accountant out of college and then I moved into real estate. Most people don’t start in real estate as a real estate agent. They start somewhere else. And success in someone’s life typically shows that they push themselves to be the best they can be, whether it was school, whether it was sports, whatever it might be. And they move into another room and they typically don’t reinvent themselves. They typically, if they’re already a leader and they already have a lot of success, they continue to have that mindset and that, that internal drive that helps them becomes very successful and continue to be successful.

CG: And when those leaders are looking at their businesses and they’re really trying to decide what they’re going to invest their energy, what they’re going to invest their time and what they’re going to invest their money in, where should they be looking first? Should they be looking at their people? Should they be looking at their technology? Should they be looking at their processes? Or are all of those things equally weighted? Where would you recommend somebody saying, “Hey, I am driving towards success. I want to bring those quality agents in. I want to grow my business. I wanna be a driving force in the market.” And they’ve got the attitude, they’ve got the energy, they’re attracting what they need to attract, but they need to start somewhere. Where do you recommend they start?

DC: Well, they need to become more strategic because you can have all the –

CG: Thank you. Oh, man. Thank you. I’m sorry. I just like had a verbal tick when I heard you say strategic. I was so excited.

DC: It’s taking some time to think through things. And that’s like many of the clients that we work with, you know, everyone’s extremely intelligent. Very high, you know, drive, internal drives, things like that. But if they’re just more strategic in key areas, key business areas of running a brokerage, they’re going to get so much further and faster and more successful. Unfortunately that’s not the case for a high percentage of people. They’re not strategic about it. So I mentioned the competitive assessment earlier. That’s a great way to great way to look at the landscape, get a full understanding of very few brokers and large teams that we work with have ever done a full competitive assessment. They have assumptions of their competitors, but they haven’t done a really deep dive to look at all their competitors. And that there’s also one of the things and being my accounting background, one of the things that I work with my clients is we dive into the profit loss statements in their financials because numbers tell stories. And if you look at improvement year over year, or then maybe they’re not improving year over year. And do some comparisons. You know, there’s some key areas within your financials that really scream to you and show you that you’ve got some challenges. There’s a profit loss statement, along with an overview, a financial overview for organizations that we use that we break down to 33 key benchmarks. And we’ll review that with clients to basically see, are they in a red area, yellow or green, you know, use the old traffic light. Red meaning you’re not performing well at all in this area. Yellow, you’re doing okay, you got to watch it, keep an eye on this, improve in this area. Green, you’re doing extremely well in this area. And depending on the model, the market and a lot of different variables, you know, just because for example, let’s say your company dollar is a key benchmark. Your company dollar percentage is in a red area or yellow. You know, that’s like going and get a full physical.  And the doctor says, you know, you have high blood pressure. It doesn’t mean you’re dying tomorrow. It just means you have high blood pressure and that you can watch.

CG: It means you have risk.

DC: What’s that?

CG: It means you have risk and like maybe, maybe invest a little bit in some salad.

DC: That’s exactly right. It gives you more information. And as we know, information and knowledge is power. And so having a better understanding of how you sit from the competitive assessment. From looking at the financials and how you’re performing in some key business areas, it allows you to make some decisions as an owner of an operation or a large team leader of, “all right, what are some things I need to tweak here or change here, or frankly stop doing to help me improve the performance of my organization”.

CG: Well, with that said, and benchmarking it and actually taking a look at what your previous performance is and what you’re going for, what does it actually look like in today’s market? What are some of the key things that that owners of large teams or owners of brokerages should be looking at to say, “yes, I am successful”. If there are three or four really key metrics they should be keying into and, asking themselves questions about, what do you think a few of those are?

DC: Well, again, it depends on the model. I’ll give you a couple of examples. So for example, if the typical key benchmarks are like return on revenue, company dollar percentage I mentioned earlier. Now, if it’s a team based model you can see those being extremely high. So return on revenue could be in the thirties, where the traditional brokerage with agents doing the majority of the sales in the business, very little company generated business, could be in the single digits. And if we find it under 4 percent return on revenue, that’s red. Four to eight’s yellow and over 8 percent’s green. And that’s in the traditional sales model, company model. Again, the team model, they’re going to be over 30 percent return on revenue. So it depends on, there’s some variables there. So when I make a statement, I just want to make sure I clarify it. There’s other things you want to look at, it’s like per person productivity. You also want to look at units per full time employee. You want to know if you’re overstaffed. Some organizations feel like they’re in a good place just because they’ve been doing the same thing for a long period of time and it’s worked, but they could be completely overstaffed. So we do an analysis on that. That’s another key area that you look at. And you talk about best practices: square footage per agent, for example. How many square feet do you have in your offices per agent and what’s your EDO, your effective desk occupancy, how many of these desks are actually being paid for by the occupants of that, the agents in that office? So there’s some areas and just, it’s more information allows you to see and allows the leader of that organization to see key areas where they need to improve in, spend some time and energy on it. Whether that incorporates technology, whether incorporates trainings, you know, whatever it might be that by shedding that light on that area and looking at, as you said earlier, benchmarking and see the benchmarks that you’re off and then you look to say, and then you prioritize that; “Compared to my competitive assessment and competitive landscape, I need to shed light more and I need to focus more energy into these key areas” and it could, it varies depending on the brokerage or the team, and the market.

CG: Okay. And so Dean, you’ve been really good about not painting anything with a broad brush, but I’m gonna ask you to paint something with a broad brush now. And so I, I wanted to call it out in advance so that I didn’t trap you into saying anything without qualifying it. If you were to look at most of the brokerages in the United States right now and identify a couple areas where there is a trend in lacking efficiency, or a trend in not being able to really meet their goals. What are some things that you would identify with that big broad brush that brokerages could all be a little bit better at?

DC: I think that  one of the things that we’re talking about a lot at our brokerages is the fact that the company generated business is an area that when we look at the team models, how extremely successful they are in generating and there’s, there’s key ways about making sure this becomes not a loss leader. Meaning, you know, just throw money at, try to generate leads, for example, from different places and it’s just, you could lose money that way, actually. So, and the traditional brokerages haven’t spent – a majority of them – haven’t spent a lot of energy and time in that company generated side in growing businesses and growing their own personal business where then they can actually generate and hand out leads to agents that they train, put them on teams, things like that.

CG: Okay.

DC: That’s, that’s one area where you talk about lack of efficiency. And it’s also, and it goes back to what we said earlier, it’s, you know, there’s lack of strategic thinking in place of some key business areas, you know, sphere of influence, as we know it’s number one continues to be a number one way people generate business.

CG: Absolutely.

DC: Do those traditional companies or do organizations have an active plan that they work with their sales associates to help generate that business, keep them in front of their prospective clients, friends, family, past clients? Very few do, very few do. And so that’s something as, as a lack of efficiency, that’s one key area, for example, that could accelerate their growth. And it doesn’t have to be a large investment. I think that’s what scares most brokerages is they think it’s going to be a large investment of money. And/or time. But the offset, like anything you do in business and life, you look at what’s the potential return and the return on that investment is going to be much better than a lot of other things they could be spending time and energy on.

CB: No, definitely and we 100 percent agree, especially, I found it interesting that you brought up the sphere because that’s something that we focus on really, really strongly when we speak with our clients. I don’t know how many offices I’ve been in, and I’ve been talking to office managers or brokerage leadership, and I, just talking to them about the conversion rate differences between Leads that are coming in from various sources and the people that are already in their agents databases, I don’t know how many eyes I’ve seen pop out of a CTO, CMOs head while we talk about the difference in conversion rate.

DC: Yeah

CG: Why do you think that’s something that people aren’t thinking about regularly? How does that fall off the radar?

DC: It’s just crazy! [laughs]

CG: [laughing] I agree!

DC: I think, think of the business, you look at it and…people at the end of day, we’re not so logical thinking, we’re emotional beings. And so the idea of doing something and having some level of comfort, working with somebody that they know, even in the world of technology as it is today, the online leads, things like that, it still purports to be such a high percentage of business is that connection between human beings. And if we can convey the fact that this person is extremely knowledgeable, successful, what they do that increases the amount of success that they have. So it’s, you know, it’s just, some people just don’t get it cause they want to try that next shiny penny. But sometimes that shiny penny is the one that’s always been shiny and it continues to be shiny. So yeah, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel sometimes. You just might want to polish it here and there, but the wheel is pretty strong the way it is. I will also throw out, Chris, one other thing I want to mention on some lack of efficiencies is recruiting. Many brokerages, even large team models, you know, there’s, I kind of always say and visualize this, you know, the world that we’re in, it’s a revolving door. Meaning everyone’s coming in to this real estate world for, in whatever role as an agent, manager, owner, whatever it might be. And for a period of time, they’re going to be in our world and then they’re exiting and they’re going to leave. And whether they leave the whole world and pass, or they go to another line of business, or they retire, or whatever – they’re going to leave. It’s just a matter of time that people are going to be involved. So recruiting is extremely important to a successful organization. And there’s a lot of inefficient recruiting efforts that take place. And mostly it’s because there’s very little effort put into active recruiting by organizations and teams. And that’s one of the biggest inefficiencies and challenges organizations have is on growth, is they’re not focused and they’re not focused enough energy in that realm, in that world of recruiting talent.

CG: Well, while we’re talking about recruiting and, and I’m glad that you brought it up because recruiting in real estate is one of those things that fascinates me. It’s different than almost any other industry because the broker is always going to the agent in real estate and so you’re going to broker opens, trying to find and attract people. And in other sort of verticals, most of the recruiting people are coming to you. And so, what do you think the dynamic is, so shifted, from other verticals? Even in technology, people are going to, to companies where they’ll do the most interesting, exciting, innovative things. And that attracts talent to your door. And for, for very specific use cases, you might go out and search for someone. But in real estate, it’s always the, the company going to the agent door. What do you think causes that change in dynamic there?

DC: Well, sometimes you have organizations that are actually, they have an incredible culture and they do a great job of accomplishment marketing. They market their accomplishments. The agents are very proud of where they are. They don’t keep it a secret. And so it ends up being the place to be so actually they do attract people. So there can be and there are brokerages that are able to generate that type.

CG: No, actually, you’re right. Because I’ve seen that.

DC: Yeah, that’s more the rare though, but that’s, that’s the minority. There’s, you know, it’s having a leader who’s magnetic – to our earlier conversation – having someone who’s dynamic in the organization. And that’s something, it’s important. It’s also having that, it’s like anything, you think about anything in your life that you’ve started focusing on as you focus your energy on something, what happens is it expands in your life. So when you focus on recruiting, finding talent out there, you’re going to find talent. You’re going to find people. And one of the things that we work with brokers on is the fact that they should have, and I always kind of explain it as spinning plates, and we want to have five spinning plates. And the idea is if you think of like a rod and a plate on top, like at a circus and someone’s spinning it, if you’re not focused on that and you don’t keep spinning it, what happens? It falls and it breaks. So the idea is you have to be continually focused in these areas. It’s not like, “okay, I’m going to throw one recruiting ad out” in wherever they throw it out. And then a month later, “I’m going to do something else”. It has to be proactive, active both looking at new sales professionals to the business, experienced agents in the marketplace, whether they’re a year in the business or less, whether the market, their business is off, traditionally agents who are experienced working with other brokers, they don’t typically leave their current brokerage unless something happens where they are that upsets them or their business is off and they blame everybody else but themselves. So that’s the idea, you look at people who are off and you also look at top producers. At some point, top producers might feel like the brokerage is unsupportive of them and their growth and where they want to go. And that might be an opportunity for you if your organization helps to purport and, and actually not even, it’s not even a perception, it’s reality – you help agents take their business to whatever level of success that they want to go to. So, it’s, thinking strategically, okay, if I’m going to go after new people, do I have the training and do I have the mentor program? Do I have the in house supports to get people up and running and be successful? Experienced agents, bringing them in, do we have things in place to help onboard them quickly, get them up to speed? Because that first two weeks when you bring an agent on whos experienced and new, frankly, it’s very critical that they get up and running very quickly and they’re feeling really good about the organization because there’s opportunity for others that they know, whether they’re, if it’s experienced agents in that office, that company, if it’s new people that went to class with them, things like that, that’s where you get a lot of good recommendations, you can get other people who will join you at the same time.

CG: Okay. Right on. Well, thank you for, thank you for taking the time to walk me through that. Cause I, it’s something that, that has really just sort of fascinated me about real estate. There is something that you said just in that conversation that I, I really want to pick out and pick on a little bit. It was the process, right? And so the process of how you onboard somebody, how do you get them into your brokerage, how you train them, how you educate them on your culture, your tools. That’s something that we find in our clients; ones with a fantastic process, see fantastic success, right? Those that don’t have a fantastic process, obviously don’t see the same level of success. So what, what can a brokerage do within itself to institute processes to, to make sure it’s gonna continually be successful and keep, not only the flywheel of recruits going, but the transaction count that’s gonna accelerate the revenue going.

DC: Everything you do more than once, you should write it down. Create a system. So one of the things, sometimes organizations are so inefficient in the recruiting efforts, they only bring somebody in maybe once, once a month or whatever the, whatever the number is…they don’t do it enough. And they don’t have a system in place because they don’t do it enough. And so the system…

CG: They don’t have any muscle memory for it, basically.

DC: Yeah. And so, one of the things, and I, when we work with brokers (and everything depends on the size), but if you’re bringing like one sales professional into the organization say for an office or one office company, whatever it might be per month, to me, that means you’re not really, you’re not focused on recruiting at all. People are like finding you just by stumbling and walking in the door. If you’re focused on recruiting efforts, you should be bringing in a lot more than one per month. And then you want to look at the process of getting an agent in the door whether new or experienced and getting them up to speed very quickly. And so you’d have two different lines there, new and experienced. And then in that process, what are the friction points? Getting someone started, getting their license up and running. We know all the legality piece, getting the business cards, all those little things, which aren’t little. Little things are big. You need to make sure you take and make yourself and your organization very proficient at. The other thing too is critical, and we found in my organization I ran. Mentors – on the job training – we had people who work specifically with new agents in the business, allowed them to hold their hand, basically get them up to speed, help them be very successful. The mentors that I had, and we worked with were very professional, had great hearts, high level of empathy, wanted to help people. That’s a critical piece in leadership is having a level of empathy and wanting to help others. The experienced side, no experienced agent wants to work with a mentor. So we used to call them office buddies. So we would have, it’s a little play on words. If you had an office buddy, now the office buddies typically also were very knowledgeable in technology. If the office buddy was not, then we would have a tech advisor in there that would also meet with the new or the experienced agent and help them get up to speed with the technology systems, the tools and allow them to get up to speed very quickly with, for example, what we talked earlier, sphere of influence, let’s get their sphere of influence in the database right in the beginning, let’s get it in ASAP. And so that was one of the things we wanted to do in the first two weeks of the process of getting somebody on board.

CG: Awesome. And so I’ve got one last question for you and I’m going to cram probably a couple of things in it.

DC: Yeah.

CG: So first, the first part of this is, how can technology help with these things that we’ve been talking about? From recruiting, to having a better process, to bringing, to bringing in more agents, to being able to identify the things in your business that may or may not working. How does technology help? And then… How can it hurt or when can it hurt?

DC: Well, I see, it helps a lot. Say for example for recruiting efforts and having a leader who is actively recruiting, has a technology tool that will enable him to keep track, see production of agents year to date, year over year, creates a follow up campaign, gives them reminders, anything like that is extremely helpful. Gosh, that just makes life so much easier. Keeps track. Gives them reminders. Hey, today you need to contact these seven people. You also had 12 people on your hit list that just had a transaction that came through the MLS. I mean, right there’s your list of people to reach out to. Congratulations. So that’s where technology becomes incredibly efficient. You know, years and years ago when you didn’t have all these tools, you know, you were using a piece of paper and a spreadsheet or you’re going to an Excel spreadsheet or something and you had to update and spend all this time and energy and do all this research. So the technology there allows you to be extremely efficient. The downside to this is people get wrapped up in thinking, you know, they do too much research, frankly, and they don’t do too much of the proactive prospecting activities; reaching out, communicating, talking to people, the old fashioned belly to belly stuff or getting people on the phone or sending a text message. They do too much research, I find. “Oh, let me research this person. Let me find out. Let me go to Facebook. Let me look at the background. Let me go to LinkedIn.” And they spend 15 minutes looking at somebody when you should just send them a quick message and congratulate him on a recent sale or whatever it might’ve been, for example.

CG: Spending two hours Googling somebody won’t tell you what you learned about them in five minutes after a handshake.

DC: Yep. And that just shows people, this is where someone needs to catch themselves and realize they’re staying away from something maybe because they don’t feel as confident in recruiting. And that’s where coming back to what we started in the very beginning. If they were very clear and concise about who they were, who they are as an organization, as an individual, and how they could help that  perspective agent, for example, or the agent that’s with them be the most successful. One of the things that we talked about is mindset. If I feel like I’m the best business partner in any, in my marketplace to help an agent be successful and hit their goals, then why wouldn’t I reach out to everybody to help them out? Why wouldn’t I reach out to try to have them come and work with me so I can help them be successful, more so than they would ever be anywhere else. And that’s the leader, that’s the kind of passion people need to have when they’re in that, in that world of a leader role and out there. And technology is a great way to go and utilize it, but don’t get lost in the technology where you’re not being proactive and you’re not doing the things that you need to do.

CG: Right on. Well, Dean, thank you for taking the time to lend your passion and knowledge about real estate to us, and I really appreciate it. It was great for me to just be able to chat with you about this stuff.

DC: Yeah.

CG: I’d like to thank our audience for tuning in and yeah, I think that’ll call it for this episode of The Real.

DC: Great, Chris. Great. Appreciate it very much. You take care.

CG: It’s been a pleasure, take care Dean.

Thanks for getting Real with us. See you next time!