February CRE Brokerage Business Review with Logan Freeman
The February Business Review episode provides insights into Logan and Tyler's commercial real estate brokerage businesses through a discussion of performance stats, pipeline visualization initiatives, ideal customer profile development, and educational content creation for leads.
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Key Takeaways:
Commercial real estate transactions seem to be picking up based on the data Logan and Tyler presented from their brokerages. Pipeline values and number of deals are increasing.
It's important for brokerages to track key performance indicators and visualize data to understand where opportunities exist to improve. This helps brokerages be more strategic.
Developing an ideal customer profile helps brokerages understand who to target and how to craft their messaging. It also acts as a screening tool for opportunities.
Communication and sharing data visually with the team is important for motivation, accountability and understanding the brokerage's progress and goals.
Utilizing tools like CRMs, dashboards and email marketing can help brokerages improve processes and track leads better.
About Your Host:
Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.
Episode Transcript:
0:00
This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by cre launch Pro. This online commercial real estate program is designed to take you from beginner to pro commercial real estate investor with access to all of my courses, our online community, and monthly group coaching calls. Learn how to confidently buy your first commercial property today at www dot c r e launch pro.com. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast today is a special episode that we just kicked off last month, we were doing a February commercial real estate brokerage, business and financials update. So last month, if you join us, you got to hear a little bit about what Logan and I are going to be doing throughout this year, which is kind of bringing you in behind the scenes of what it's like running a commercial real estate brokerage, what our goals are for the year, and how we are working with our teams to hit the goals that we have set. Today, we're going to run through the numbers that both of us have hit so far this year, compared to what our goals are. And then I want to dive into some work that Logan has been doing over the past week, he's put some serious will maybe past couple of weeks. He's putting some serious time and effort with his brokers covering their ideal customer profiles and building up their online contract mate content matrices. So that'll be a really good thing to dive into whether you're a broker, or you are a managing broker. So Logan, what's going on man?
1:26
You know what I've been really inspired recently by a few different things. You know, I'm always a reader of the headlines. But I'm always a little weary of the headlines on if that's really applicable to the markets that we're in this time. What I've been kind of focused on and seen is that people, large institutions, like we've talked about previously on the show, have capital ready and are calling market bottoms. I mean, we've got Goldman Sachs, we've got Brookfield, Blackstone Fundrise, Kymco all saying, this is the time to kind of get back in. Okay, so fine. That's, you know, that's the 800 pound gorilla is mentioning that and talking right, and that's fine. But what is actually happening on on Main Street in your markets. And I will say that the last two weeks have been an enormous uptick in regards to just transaction movement closings and new listing agreements being signed. And so if those clothes on the back end will be, you know, the actual marker, right, like, are they actually going to trade but, you know, people just weren't even willing to, to really list their properties here, previously. And so that seems to be a little bit of a change in sentiment, which is kind of getting me excited. I think everybody is still sort of waiting on the Federal Reserve to come out and, and drop rates. And unfortunately, for a lot of people, I don't think that's happening. And so we'll see, you know, but I wouldn't bank on that what's happened is, you know, I think the realistic expectations of where maybe the market is, and where might be heading, is starting to really come to fruition in regards to to sellers, and what they think they can actually get for their property. So, you know, we've, we always track the Green Street property price index. And, you know, we're at levels that we hadn't seen since July of 2021. You know, we're right around 120 on the index. And so, I think a lot of people are looking at this saying, Okay, this is a good time, you know, as a buyer to get in at a good basis, and figure out the capital structure, even if I have to be a little bit more creative. So what I'm feeling what I'm hearing, what I'm seeing happen in the business and out on the on the main street is, is transactions starting to kind of be drummed back up and, and people are starting to try to come together to get deals done. And so that's really exciting, right? I mean, if the earlier part of this, this this month, I, you know, I'll share this with you, Tyler, we, I went to a kind of a mentor ship similar to go abundance, but it's a local one here. They're there in a couple of different markets, but went to one of these groups. And, you know, some of these guys were talking about writing these letters from the CEO. And these letters have different components that they share with their teams every single month. And I was like, Man, I really liked that idea. I think that's really cool to try to keep everybody you know, updated. And so I started doing that in December, and writing, you know, what our goals were for the month, reviewing where we're at with our rocks, doing a kind of a superstar spotlight, talking about challenges. And, you know, I wrote this month in March on March 1, that I had a feeling that the tides were changing, and not necessarily because things are changing in the ecosystem or the market, but because of the work that the team has been putting in is going to make that tide change in their favor and And, you know, frankly, I think that a lot of people have a lot of pent up exuberance in regards to, you know, wanting to get some transactions done. So I think we're, we're sort of in that period of time right now, in my opinion of this kind of like little low, right? We're, we're finishing up q1, I think q2 is going to still be sort of quiet. But the real deal makers are going to be really busy in q2, and then maybe stuff turns back on, and q3 and q4. And so right now could be a really good time as an investor, to be out there beating the bushes, and so excited to kind of share all of the progress that the team has made, and what I've been doing with the brokers here with you and with the audience. Yeah,
5:41
I mean, that's the that's the fun thing about owning a commercial real estate brokerage and being an investor at the same time, right? Because commercial real estate brokerage is the front lines of what is going on in the commercial real estate industry. And when I was putting together the numbers for today, I mean, you can kind of feel it, right, like I can feel over the past month, something has been a lot better than like, like, February was a better month in January. But you know, how do you actually like go through and quantify that, right. And as I was putting the numbers together for today, you know, I was looking at, you know, the inbound leads, and they're almost double, in both aspects, both inbound calls, and inbound emails, like leads to the website. And those are those are typically leads that are generated either through the YouTube channel, the podcasts, or our general SEO, right. So there's a whole lot of other leads that we're working on that are active, we're going out and sourcing those, but these are just literally inbound, somebody else's going out and finding us coming through it. So let's do this. I'll go ahead and knock mine out. First. You have a nice, new, beautiful, little slide deck presentation, which I'm excited to dive into today as well. Let me share my screen, add you to the right. There we go. Alright, so for those of you listening on the podcast, I've got my HubSpot deck pulled up right now. So let's, let's pull this up real quick. February stats value of the deals that we closed in February alone was $1,921,623. So total closed so far for the year. This is as of February 29 is $3.27 million. So you can see like year over year, it's nice when you actually visualize things like this. I mean, if you look at that year over year, last year, at this time, we had sold about $45,000, which is clearly just a very small lease. And we really didn't start picking up business until around May, like April May, which is typically how a commercial real estate brokerage goes January, February, you know, you're kind of just starting to get things started, which is, you know, can be frustrating. But that's just kind of the cyclical nature. We had a total of seven deals that we completed for leases and three sales for a total number of deals so far through February of 10, closed for the year. Now here's what was interesting. So we had inbound leads, 59 phone calls, and 25 through the website. If I pull up last month's numbers, which I thought I already had saved, give me a second, we only had a 11 inbound leads from the website. And we had 47 phone calls. So we ended up getting 12 more inbound phone calls, and almost twice as many through the website. So that to me means if we've got 25 more or sorry, 14 more leads coming through the website. That means that people are going in searching for commercial real estate more online. And that's how they're finding us. Oops, I don't know how I just did that. zoomed in quite a bit. I don't know how that just happened. Interesting. Well, let me see if I can zoom back out. It's not gonna happen. All right, let me pull this up. So anyway, getting back to it, let's see. So again, like this is the nice thing and you'll see, you know, Wogan is using monday.com When you visualize numbers in your business, like the way that we are doing it makes it really easy to understand how things are going. Who is doing what right. So like I could see deals closed by Rep this quarter. You know, I've got I've got some, you know, guys that are kicking tail and we've got some that are, you know, lagging behind but the great thing is like everybody's got quite a bit in their pipeline. You see deals, you know, last quarter compared to the year before And, you know, deals this quarter compared to the year before. I mean, we're just we're crushing it this quarter. Although, look, we are going to fall very short of our quarterly goals. Based on everybody's individual goals, we should be hitting about $22 million in sales by the end of March. Spoiler alert for March, we're not going to hit that. By but, you know, we'll see. So total leads for the year 142. So far, for a total of 10, deals, closed, active deals, 55 and a pipeline value of 47,631,000. So all in all, shaping up to be a better year than last year for sure. Will we hit our goals of, you know, $80 million in volume? I think. So. We've got a couple of deals in the pipeline. Like that's the weird thing about commercial real estate brokerage? Right? We've got a couple of deals in the pipeline, you know, once $40 million, that we're trading an LOI on right now, another one is somewhere between 18 and $20 million. So you could have what looks like a completely unsuccessful year, up until December, and then all of a sudden, you close a $50 million deal. Right? You never, you never really know. That's the fun part about trying to forecast and commercial real estate, it doesn't really work all that well.
11:13
Yeah, definitely. I've definitely found that out here. As I was building out my dashboards, one thing I try to harp on all the time is making sure that you're thinking about your pipeline as a funnel. And, you know, I use the analogy of elephants, deer, and rabbits, right. So your rabbits would be your leases, you know, those are your base hits, just get on base, get them done. And you maybe got your, you know, your deer, which are kind of that mid size, right, and you're perfect, you're perfect sweet spot, so to speak, then you got those elephants that you're always hoping that might come through. But if you only focus on the elephant, they clog up the funnel, and the pipeline for everything else. And so you need to have a good mix of all of those different ones and ensure if you if you land an elephant, then you're going to be eaten for a long time. But you have to make sure that you're focused on those deers and those rabbits all of the time to make sure that that pipeline stays full, and you know, doesn't get clogged up. And yeah, I had the same issues with, you know, trying to forecast because, you know, you can put a probability, you know, on these deals to close, but then you have no idea. For example, I'm sitting here on Sunday, kind of looking at my sales dashboard, just kind of reviewing things for our Monday meeting, and I get a message and, you know, Saturday night late that, you know, a three and a half million dollar deal that I didn't even have on our pipeline when under contract is a 30 day cash offer. Right? Like, I'm like, wait, what? Where was that? Where was that forecast today? It wasn't forecasted anywhere. So that's the hard part. But you know, that's, that's, that's the name of the game? Well,
12:44
and that's the funny thing, too, right? I mean, we just went under contract last week for a $5.6 million all cash, you know, buyer set to close by March 31. You know, fingers closed, I think it goes hard tomorrow. But we don't know, there's so much that could happen between now and tomorrow. And, you know, like you were talking about earlier with the rabbits, the deer and the elephants. Like if you broke down the 10 deals that we've done so far this year. I mean, we've got everything from like a $26,000 total $26,000 deal all the way up to I think the biggest one that's closed so far is like just under a million dollars. And you know, that $26,000 One Well, yeah, that's that's not a lot, it's probably not worth working on. On its own is part of a larger shopping center on which we have the entire for lease listing, right. So you want to work on those deals, because one, you've got steady, consistent leasing income that's going to come out of this whole center. But eventually we're going to sell that shopping center, right. And so you want to have a good relationship, you want to be the guy that's working on it for five years doing every single one of those leases so that by the time the sale comes along, you know everything about that property and you are the perfect person to sell it.
14:01
That's exactly right. Tyler, I think you hit the head nail on the head there. I mean, you take deers and in rabbits and turn them into elephants in those scenarios. So it's also you know, cultivating that and growing those relationships is extremely important. We we definitely had a slow February, we had no closings in February so I don't have all of my leases in here for our commercial properties whether that be renewals or new leases so I haven't added that into our our pipeline yet but do you want to pull up my my spreadsheet real quick? Yeah,
14:33
I was. I'm pulling that up right now because I didn't realize that you didn't do you not have the ability to share I'm guessing
14:41
now I think I can.
14:45
If you can share it go for it. If not have got yours. Not a oh here we go.
14:58
Let's see if this works.
15:02
Hear, let me do it. Here we go. Okay, guys, bear with us. It's our second time going through this. Yeah,
15:11
this is this is good enough, right? So our active deal values, you know, back in January, we had about 2.8 under contract with another 1.5 listed. That was really only two deals, and the total pipeline was right around 4.3 million, fast track to February, we're sitting at about 2.5 million under contract with another 1.5 listed in the pipeline had grown to about $6.4 million. At the beginning of March, we had about $5.1 million of real estate under contract with another 1.6 listed. So our pipeline had kind of grown to 7.4. And then something interesting happened in the last two weeks, you know, this is kind of what I've been feeling and what you have been feeling and maybe what the headlines are kind of telling us, but we now have $10 million of deals under contract 4.3 In proposals, so that's excuse, you know, exclusive listing agreements out to sellers that we think are, are going to sign another 5.2 listed for a total pipeline of $21 million right now, in our active deal pipeline. And so, you know, that's, that's massive, because, you know, I'm sitting here, you know, in January at $4.3 million, and now we're sitting at $21.1 million, you know, from a forecasted pipeline standpoint, it's just sort of kind of like this, you know, what I'm really tracking is what is the one plus active deals value? And my calculation with this is okay, things that are under contract that we have listed, that we have an exclusive agreement out on that we believe is going to sell or sorry, or list and what has closed, right, so that's kind of the the $21 million figure there, the forecasted pipeline would be outside of that $21 million. What deals do I know that the team are working on currently that are trying to get it to that next stage, right, and this is kind of where that that funky forecasting is, because you can put a probability on maybe something happens maybe doesn't. Anyways, I'm My goal right now is to get that number, that's at 57 million to 110 million, because our goal is to do about $55 million in real estate this year. So I'm hoping that if we can double the forecasted pipeline from what we're trying to accomplish, we can close on 50% of that. And so I'm still working through the forecasted, you know, pipeline section. But what I do like about this is, you know, I've got different stages up here as well. So I can see kind of a breakdown in a pie chart, basically, that says, Okay, what's listed what's under contract and what's out for proposal. And then I'm looking at closed volume by month, you know, January was a light month, February was even lighter in nothing, right? March is going to be a light month about $780,000. But if that was to forecast out to April, and May, that jumps up quite a bit, right. So that's what I'm kind of looking at. I don't have year over year data necessarily visualized, like you do in HubSpot, but next year, I'll be able to run those reports and be able to see kind of where we were at, compared to this year versus, you know, next year. And then I love this one right here that you've got up, which is deal progress based on month added. Now, I started this because of the, you know, the different dashboards that you had pulled up in January. And so we're gonna have a lot of deals that were added in March here. And so that's a little bit skewed, right, because we added most of these in March and, and most of those are from the pipeline, the forecasted pipeline. But at the end of the day, I think that the deal progress that by month is really interesting. Because once we start to have that year over year data, we'll actually be able to compare what that looks like. And if you keep scrolling down, yeah, you've got it up deal stages by team member, right. So I can see kind of, you know, I just brought on two new brokers, right. So our three active brokers definitely have deals working, I've got another two that I'm working on. And one other guy that's kind of figuring out his ideal customer profile right now. So this helps the team be able to log in and kind of see where their, their deals are, as well. And then, you know, the last couple are just simply deal closed by month and and closings by month as well with the volume and a number of deals kind of standpoint. And so, you know, this is a huge upgrade in regards to the Excel sheet in the status report that I was running, you know, previously. And what I think this allows people to do is tell a story about what's going on in the business. And I think that's extremely important, because when you're looking at rows and columns and cells, and highlighted things, it's a little bit more difficult. But this has a lot of functionality, which would allow you to actually scroll up and hit the person. And so if it's attributed correctly, you can toggle, you know, by Agent by broker in the in the company so you can see, you know, their personalized dashboards, which is really cool. So this is one of the initiatives that I was working on in Archon has been received, I think really well by the team. The other two things that we are working on are, you know, in activity scorecard. So I'm hoping and I'm building a widget to add to this spreadsheet here, this dashboard. That gives points for activities. Right. And so gamification, you know, I took this this right out of your playbook in regards to the dip the dip for I forget what you were calling them, they weren't goals, I call them bounties. bounties. Right? Yeah. So there's these different bounties, right. And so my goal is to and I got inspired from one of my brokers who sent me a LinkedIn post, I saw a whiteboard, and it had the different activities, whether that be calling a new prospect getting a prospects email, sending out a POV, scheduling a meeting, completing a meeting, having an in person meeting all those different things, which hopefully out, you know, obviously go to, you know, more transactions, and you actually put a point system together for each week, and you have a goal that you're trying to hit, you know, 125 points or something like that. And so I'm working on getting buy in, right now to be able to have everybody load those activities up and have a nice little, you know, scoreboard here on this widget to show where everybody's at, in regards to the activity and trying to gamify that, and each month, the person who has the most activity is going to get a nice surprise, I haven't forgotten, you know, figured out what that's going to be yet. So that's another big, you know, initiative that I am working on, right now. And, you know, I mean, alongside that tomorrow, I've got probably the fifth meeting on the CRM system that we are implementing. So as you can see, man I'm taking I'm trying to take the brokerage kind of from where we were of just kind of slinging deals and Excel spreadsheets and really trying to take it to the next level. So we can be more you know, rifled in and we can understand where we at from a pipeline standpoint, and then also having a really robust property database that has buyer side has client side and seller side and has the vendors that we want to be, you know, always marketing to so very excited, you know about those, those initiatives. And the other thing that I've been focused on with two of the new brokers is, you know, I shared quite a bit of information with you about this. But as you're bringing on new people trying to really figure out what their detail market focus area is going to be. And then outside of that, okay, now we got to dive into what those ideal customer profiles for because we do serve buyers, and property owners. And so I basically took this book right here knowing isn't doing by Rod Santa Massimo, from the Massimo group, and really broke down the ideal customer profile and the focus questions that we wanted to be working on what are their challenges, and I'm taking that and going over to Justin Walsh's LinkedIn operating system and helping the, you know, the brokers to develop their online presence on how to write content and what's their content going to look like. And so, before this meeting in this show here, I was actually going back through that course, and getting ready to be able to help these guys write their own LinkedIn content. You know, outside of that, that's a lot. But outside of that, Tyler, we've, we've also got a couple of really great events coming up. It's Royals opening day up here next week. So we always have a big opening day party tailgating party out at the Kauffman Stadium. And if anybody's follows Kansas City, obviously, you know that they're trying to move the ballpark downtown, but that won't be for quite some time. And so we've got a big event going on out there. And we're also planning out our charity golf tournament for the later the later part of this year as well in September. So lots of initiatives, lots of great things going on, trying to take some some really chapters out of your book and implement them back into the brokerage and I'm excited to kind of see, you know, how that develops. And, you know, what that creates in regards to efficiency in the company?
23:49
Yeah, well, likewise, man, I mean, you know, after digging into your ICP, you know, I'm sitting here thinking, Man, I mean, you know, everybody kind of has an idea of who their ideal customer profile is. But it's, it's a completely separate thing to actually have that written out. And I'm looking at that I'm like, You know what, I've got to sit down with each of my brokers and just and just go through this exercise, because it helps you start to understand him. And I went through that a few years ago, when I was doing my own brokerage, and came to the conclusion, like, the only people I need to be prospecting for are doctors. That's literally it. Those are the only people I need to be talking to. Every lease that they signed is like 500,000 to a million dollars or more. Every building that they're buying, they are immediately qualified by a bank, they have zero financing issues. It makes my life unbelievably easy. So you know, you sit down and you come up with that ideal customer profile and then it tells you okay, well where are they hanging out? With? Who are their friends? What does their day to day look like? When is it best for you to stop and talk to them? I mean, it helps you really craft your your actual pitch to these individuals, which I think is great. Going back to the visuals I know I said earlier, like, oh, man, these visuals are so great. But you know, it's exciting to see you coming up with them too. And talking about sharing them with the team, because I have them up in every single team meeting. I mean, everybody can go and look at them at any time throughout the week whenever they want to. But I have it up in the team meetings so that everyone sees, okay, this broker is crushing it, man, I gotta catch up to that broker. Right? Because, you know, when I was when I was in the midst of my sales, that's what always motivated me, I would be looking at, you know, somebody had sold more than me that day, and I was like, not a chance is that person gonna beat me this week or this month? Like, that's just not gonna happen? I'm gonna go out there, I'm gonna make five more phone calls, I'm gonna book two or three more appointments, and I'm gonna get ahead of them again. You know, there's, there's something about creating this, like, you know, boiler room sales culture, that, you know, I mean, take all the negative aspects out of that, right, because there's a lot of negativity that can be associated with with sales rooms. But the there's something about the team, the the friendly competition, that, in my opinion, brings out so much more than anybody could ever do on their own. I mean, is that something that you've kind of found with your team? Oh,
26:13
yeah, absolutely, man. 100%. I mean, the, the visuals are so important. Because, again, if you're just operating off the Excel sheet, everybody can kind of look at that and know who's deals or what, but when you actually have it broken out by, you know, broker by agent, and it showcases where everyone is, it's like, Man, I do want to catch that person I do want to focus on, you know, and I want to how do I do that, right, and gets them excited. And if you're showing that and keeping people accountable, every single Monday, or whatever the sales meeting is, you know, they gotta show up, and they gotta have that meeting, and they want that to feel good. And we're social beings, and we want to be accepted by other people. And, honestly, if you're a younger broker in an office, and there's another broker that's really crushing it, and you start to put in the work and the activity, yeah, you know, they're gonna probably say, Man, that person is really working hard, they're probably going to be more open to spending more time with you and or trying to cross collaborate on deals. Right. I think that is, that's a really important, you know, piece to this as well. And so yeah, I think that's great. And I think it's important, but I can't imagine how many, you know, businesses are still just operating with that, that level of information that owner that managing broker of that company might have, but they're not sharing it in a way that's digestible for the rest of the team that showcases even for the person answering the phones and the inbound leads that hey, you know, this is, this is important. And here's why. Right? You know, I mean, I think that it'd be, it'd be great to know, if your receptionist knew exactly who your ideal customer profile was, for buyer clients and for seller clients, and what kind of qualification could happen just on that first call, if they call your receptionist? That you could then you know, have for your, for your agent know exactly where to pass that on? So, you know, I was writing earlier today, you know, I think that the commercial real estate, you know, industry, this is a knowledge based business. And yes, there are certain things that you can do brand, presence and activity and relationship building, that's all important. But that's a given. But if you have more knowledge, and you have it in a way that you can share it with your team, and with your clients, you're going to get a leg up, that's not just in real estate that's in any type of industry, right? And because if you're selling a service or a product, and you have more knowledge about the industry at large, and as a whole, as a whole, your clients are going to find that valuable. And so how are you communicating that to them? So, you know, I forgot I mentioned, I forgot to mention this. Another thing that I just got, you know, the first draft was, I had this Google Drive, that if a buyer was interested in Kansas City, it had 15 folders in it had all the sub market reports and had all these documents in there that was really kind of clunky, all the information was in there. But they had to click through 100 times to try to figure out what they're trying to find. I went ahead and found somebody on fiverr.com to basically and I wrote a 25 page ebook for, you know, I call it the Kansas City Deal navigator. And I aggregated all that information, I use chat GPT to help me fill in the pieces of content that I needed help on. And then I had a professional graphic designer go on and three days, I have a 36 page ebook that looks like something that, you know, I don't know CBRE or something like that would be sending out. And it's all focused on someone who's trying to break into Kansas City and understand the different sub markets and different classes where they should be, who are the lenders who are the property managers. Now I have that document, right? Because when people were just previously coming to the website, they fill out a form and then they go to no man's land and they had no idea. You know what was going to happen next? Well, I'll tell With this ebook, I'm also building out a five to seven email educational program that is free, it's going to have its own landing page. And based on that any form that somebody fills out, they're going to automatically go to this educational email program, get five to seven emails from me, the last ones are going to be case studies and references from people that we've worked with and deals that we've done. And then the last one is going to be that master ebook. And it's going to say, Okay, now are you ready to you know, if you're a buyer, are you ready to enter into what we call the BRS s or the buyer representation Success System? If so, let's schedule a call and get the first step going. But previously, it was just schedule a call, now I'm taking seven to nine days warming them up, giving them the information over a drip, and then they're getting the ebook, and then the call to action to actually, you know, schedule with our team and all that's tracked. So you can see, you know, if you got 500 leads, you know exactly where each person is. And if they finish it and don't schedule a call, you better believe one of those brokers better be on the phone, calling them saying, Hey, I just saw that you went through the educational email program, I'd love to talk with you about your goals of investing in Kansas City. So I mean, now now, I probably mentioned seven to 10 things that I've been doing in the last, you know, you know, month and a half or months since we've had our last previous call. And now that I'm listing it all out, I'm like, Alright, man, good job, pat yourself. On top of that, with the pipeline, I'm getting pretty pumped up here. But that's this all came to fruition because I started to look at the KPIs, I started to look at the data, where's the drop off? How come the team doesn't know where we're at with the pipeline? Okay, well, they, they don't know how to visualize it. So as I dove in, and got more involved, I started to see pain points, I started to see things that I could improve and, and that's kind of flourishing into all these different initiatives that we're working on. And I'm, I'm pretty positive, we're gonna, you know, end up in more transactions this year.
31:55
Man, I love it. I mean, you've you've been, you've been putting the work in, and that's inspiring me, which means I'm gonna have to put a hell of a lot of work in over this next month, so that I can come back and, and try and keep up with you, man. I mean, that's Look, that's that's what 100% While I wanted to do this, because now I'm, I'm inspired on all the things I gotta do. I've got, man, I mean, this, this will. This is just a good anecdote for you, considering what you're just now starting. I have several downloads on my website, I've got a due diligence checklist for you know, investors that are buying commercial real estate, I've got a, I don't know, whatever intensive what maybe a free copy of my first book. And I think over the last two, three years, I mean, probably not even two, yeah, two, three years, I guess, that I've had those up on my website, we've brought in like four or 5000 emails. Wow. I mean, think about that, like the amount of people that have gone through and downloaded those that are now opportunities for us, because you're not going to be downloading a purchase, you know, Letter of Intent template, unless you're interested in buying commercial real estate. That's right, you're not going to be downloading a due diligence checklist, unless you are interested in buying commercial real estate. So those are all hot leads for us to jump on. So you know, I need to get better about coming up with an email sequence. Because right now there's like a two or three email sequence that goes out to them, that I built a couple years ago, time to update it. So you know what I'm gonna go in and update that and change that up. Also, I actually did an employee survey. So this is I've got 14 employees are 13 plus a fractional CFO. And so we surveyed all of them. One thing that came back, is that I'm not a very good communicator, which is kind of funny, right? Because I'm, like, you know, constantly talking, educating me. We're live streaming three times a week, I've got a podcast, but a YouTube channel. But I'm not a good internal communicator, I don't send you know, I'm not really good with my email. I'm not really good with answering the phone. Because I'm usually, you know, busy. So I'm texting one. So, the great thing about that survey is that I got that feedback from the team of like, hey, it'd be great for you to communicate with us a little bit more. And so, you know, part of that was I haven't communicated the vision, well enough of what we're doing. And this is kind of what you touched on earlier. You want, you know, even the receptionist to know what the vision is for what everybody is doing. So, I have an executive coach that I've hired Dr. Michael Burcham. He's a he's a professor at Vanderbilt. He is one of the top dogs at shore capital, which manages billions of dollars of private equity. And we are going in for a two hour workshop, the entire team, brokerage team to talk about what the company is what our vision is, our values, our mission. I mean, everything we did this a couple of years ago and walked away with a 40 or 50 Page strategic book on what the Cabo group is and how we're going to accomplish all of our vision and goals. Sure. And so I was thinking, you know, I mean, I've brought in, you know, a whole bunch of people, I had to have my six brokers with me. Last time we did that, so time to go in and redo that. So we're doing that in April, going in with the team doing a new strategic session. So, you know, I think there's little things like that, that I mean, I hadn't surveyed the employees in a long time. I mean, it's nice to give them an opportunity to give you some anonymous feedback, right? Because sometimes, you know, people don't really feel comfortable saying, Hey, you suck at sending emails. Can you fix that? I'm like, okay, yeah, you know what, maybe I should probably fix that. Or at least do something, or at least tell them like, hey, this problem is never going to get fixed. Let's find another way to communicate. So that at least it gets addressed. But let's, let's dive into your ICP. Do you want me to screen share the email that you shut over? Do you want me to pull up the the Excel spreadsheet? How do you want to kind of dive through that?
35:56
Yeah, I mean, I think probably the email is the best way to do it. The spreadsheet a little higher level. Yeah, this spreadsheet has about 15 different tabs, but it's one to actually get, you know, get it get to where you want to go. Before we do that, you know, or just right now, I think that two things that really helped my internal communication was this letter from the CEO. So I will send you the the gentleman's name and or the draft of the letter from CEO that explains what that is, that's a monthly cadence that goes out to your team and just kind of keeps everybody updated. Like that, you know, they don't really say much about it, but it sets the tone, it sets the tone. And when I mentioned something in the, in the email, they haven't really responded back or, you know, emailed me back. But, you know, in conversations, I know that they have they have read it, right, which is really important. And then Cameron Harold, you know, really helped me on occasions died. Yeah. So, you know, this, all this stuff about the vivid vision, right. And so writing that vivid vision, and in a way that gets people excited, you know, in a lot of people do it in a newspaper article type of format, and then posting that and or, you know, always coming back to it on a quarterly or monthly basis. And or posting it so your team can see it, I think, is, is phenomenal. So yeah, I think those are two great things to help the communication styles. Internally, we utilize slack. And I tried to get every agent and broker, you know, doing that. And, you know, one thing that's also helped on Slack is, I've got most of the team, you know, putting in their powerless for the day in a specific Slack channel. And it has everybody that's participating in that saying, Well, here's the five top tasks that I'm trying to accomplish today. And then they have to review their previous day, and then put the next five for that day in there too. So I can always kind of see what they're working on, and maybe redirect or help and say, Hey, I see that this was on your power list. Is there anything I can do to support you to get something done here? So that's been helpful on the communication styles as well.
38:02
Now of that, yeah, cuz I mean, look, we're a team. You know, that's one thing I've been very adamant about building. When I started building the team, this brokerage because you can see very clearly at many bigger corporate real estate brokerages, they, they tend to have a more toxic culture, where you don't want to talk about deals in front of other people, you don't want to share deals with other people, because there's this, you know, they might steal that deal from you, I might call that client and blow that deal up, there's you never know. I mean, I've made it, I've made it very clear with my team that everybody hears working together, you may not be working on the deals together or sharing in commissions. But if there's a way for everybody here to help each other out, that's what we're doing. And if I catch wind of anybody taking a deal from somebody else, or doing something like that, you're out here, that one strike, because this is a you know, visit team, like we are a team working together to absolutely crush commercial real estate sales, as well. Absolutely,
38:58
man 100%. And, you know, you if you and here's the thing, if you have a really good producer, that's not willing to be on the team that can that can really be a cancer for everyone else. And so as a leader of a sales organization, not just in real estate, but in any type of industry, if you have a really great producer, that's that's really cagey and you're not willing to be a team that can really influence all the other people on that team and, and you don't want to hang all of your eggs, you know, put all your eggs let's say it's Easter, right, so you know, no one to put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. I think that's really, really important. So, man, I love the engagement here today. We got a lot of people showing up, man, this is great. They must really want to be talking about, you know, growing a business and how to figure this stuff out. But hopefully people are hearing two things. One, that you know, the commercial real estate industry seemingly we are on a tipping point of maybe going back up in regards to transactions. We're showing you real time data in two different markets that you know, that is happening on and the second one is All of the stuff that it takes to, you know, be able to post those, you know, case studies and those just closed and all those different things. It's, there's a lot of work that goes into this. And I hope everybody's finding that to be valuable. And I would say that the amount of people that are on here and, and engaging is great. So fantastic to see that.
40:17
Yeah, want to say real quick before we dive into the ICP? You know, yeah, we've got close to 58 people that are that are in here with us in the live stream. If you have questions, or if there's anything that you guys want us to dive into, or cover more, moving forward, let us know. I mean, Logan and I are building this this plane as we're falling off the cliff, trying to figure out like, hey, what's the best way to kind of present this right? Because there's no, there's nothing out there like this. Right? Nobody else is breaking apart. There are commercial real estate brokerages showing you the actual numbers talking about their strategy. Because again, we don't really don't care, right? Like it's a win win for everybody. If you guys learn how to be better brokers, maybe you can bring us deals and we can work together. Right. Everybody wins? You know, I think the gosh, there was something else I was gonna say. I don't know. But yes, 60 people joining the livestream really cool to see we broke 100 For the first time this past week. So it's awesome. Exciting.
41:16
Yeah, most definitely, man. Okay, so ideal customer profile. This is this can also be avatar, right? It can be, you know, the name is a lot of different things. What you're trying to accomplish here is, who are you serving in regards to the business that you're you're leading, but also, you know, what? Is it that the pain points that they're feeling? Right? And how do you speak to those, because the faster that you can speak to that pain, agitate that pain, and then introduce a solution at some point, the better you're going to be getting to deals done. And so, you know, a lot of people just gloss this over, right? They're like, well, I know who my ICP is, it's, you know, buyers that are looking to accomplish, you know, X, Y, and Z, or it's a property owner looking to accomplish X, Y, and Z. And that's just not the truth. And a very good example of this would be, you know, we have a system to represent buyers, we call it the buyer representation Success System, or the BRFSS. That is not for every single buyer and institutional buyer, buyer and or somebody who already owns five deals. And Kansas City doesn't need the BRFSS. But that person that just sold their single tenant net lease deal in California, and are looking for a 1031 exchange deal in Nashville or Kansas City, they need to know, where do I buy in Kansas City? What types of properties should I be looking for, who's going to do a property management who's going to do the leasing, who's going to do the lending on this deal, and if you can bring that together in a cohesive way, that's a big value add for that client. Right. So that's a prime example of, you know, not all buyers are an ICP for the buyer representation Success System. Similarly, on the sell side, you know, if somebody's really looking to just kind of test the market, and a prime example of this, I'll give you another example. Somebody called me on a mixed use building, not the best area of town. And it's been listed with a residential agent for quite some time, I looked at the listing quickly looked at it, it was built in 1910, it was 6400 square feet, and they wanted $850,000 for it, that's $123 per square foot, and not so good area, with a building that was built in 1910. Get out of here, there's no way possible that that's going to make any sense. So that's not a that's a seller of a property that wants to work with me, or our brokerage firm. But that's not an ideal client for us, I have to go back to them and say, Look, you know, I'm buying retail between in Johnson County, Kansas in some of the best sub markets for 75 to 80 bucks a square foot, that deal is likely worth, you know, 400,000 square feet or $14,000. Right, if you're lucky. So anyways, that's just a two good examples on both sides, that really, you know, will showcase this to, to your to your brokers to say, you know, not every single person is an ideal customer profile for us and what we do. And so I think that going through this exercise, and getting this out, and making sure that when new deals come through, and or an agent or broker is getting ready to make phone calls, you know, people or people say, you know, you went to a networking event and said, Hey, what do you do? Who do you work with, being able to be able to come back to this sheet, and know that we spent two hours working through this, methodically, be able to pull it up and rattle this off until it gets into your memory is like, okay, now I can do that. It also acts as a screener for opportunities. So if an opportunity comes your way, and one of my senior brokers kind of sent that deal to me, he's like, Hey, I'm not going to work on this. But if anybody you know, in the brokerage firm work on this, I said, Why don't you want to he goes, that's not my ideal customer profile. That's going to take me off of what my main focus and my main priority is now that is a seasoned salesperson right there that knows exactly what they're honing in on and what they're trying to accomplish. They're going to walk away from maybe a $500,000 $600,000 deal. To make sure that they don't lose out on something else, right, so, and that's something that that fell into their lap. And so, you know, this was a really great exercise that we went through. And again, I basically took rods off to Moscow's methodologies, put it into an Excel file, feel free Tyler to share that with anybody that reaches out and wants to go through that. And if they want to go into a deep dive in regards to how do I actually walk through this, I will show them because I do it in a unique way, you have to start with your avatar, basically, demographics psychographics, then you go over to their challenges, their pain points, you talk to your value proposition. Okay, now that you have all that the focus questions, what questions do you need to be asking to get the information that you need? Then it's like, how do I actually engage with this person, right, so now I have to have an engagement or a sales process to actually work through that. And this was important for us to do, you know, early on, because this dries all of the content that you or the broker will be posting and or talking about with other folks, right. And so this alone, allowed me to go generate 50, LinkedIn posts for each one of these brokers on the buy side and the sales side very easily after we knew what the pain points were. And that's really, really important to understand. Because if you're just generally posting market reports, nobody's going to engage with that. But if you know that, hey, this market report is a rear view looking kind of methodology from the last quarter, here's actually what I think is going to happen this quarter of based on these trends. Now somebody's going to read that content, right. And so that's what this ICP kind of worksheet and or process helps people really understand is speaking to the pain points, and the challenges that people are are feeling. So your messaging and your communication is really going to land and they're not going to just forget you and and put you into a bucket of every other commercial real estate broker out there.
46:53
Well, and once you've put something like this together, I mean, it takes time, right? All you said it took you a couple of hours to do this. Once you have this information pulled together, you can use it in so many different ways, right? I mean, you could copy and paste this and into Chet GPT and say, Hey, come up with 50 Different LinkedIn posts that would you know, that a that my target buyer would appreciate in commercial real estate, come up with, you know, 10 different blog topics that I could write about that this target customer would be searching on Google for the problems that they have, right? I mean, there's so many different ways that you could actually utilize this just with AI alone. That's right.
47:36
I'm glad. I'm glad that you said that this was this was generated utilizing AI as well. And also, you can download that spreadsheet into a PDF loaded into chat GPT and say, I'm about to start making prospecting calls, I'm making calls to this ideal customer profile. And here are the objections that I have been getting previously helped me think through how to get in redirect past those objections. And objections are twofold I want I want to just idealized this really, really quickly. You know, objections are obstacles, which is things that you incur before you make an offer. And objections are what you get after you make your offer. If you just blow past all of the obstacles, and you go and make the offer, you're not only going to get objections, you're also going to get obstacles. So you need to work through those obstacles first, and then get to the real objections and continue to pro but chat GPT those language models can really help you gamify that and actually go through a mock prospecting call on you know, say, you know, act like the hardest, you know, ideal customer profile and the most difficult buyer that I might be talking with or property owner, what will they maybe say to me, and then you will feel a lot more confident that you've gone through that process to be able to actually think through what those those challenges might be. So you can you can address them in real time on those phone calls. So yes, you this ICP once you haven't landed, landed and it's really tight, you can load that up into chat GPT you can use it in so many different ways. And he just really creates clarity for all the people involved in the process. Man,
49:09
you know, it'd be a fun episode to do is to just pull up chatty BT, and go through a process like this, right? Like, I was just thinking through my head, you know, like, it'd be great to to prompt chat GBT with with this ideal customer profile, and then tell it like, Hey, I'm negotiating a letter of intent for a restaurant that checks these boxes or whatever, right? And, you know, what are, you know, what are a couple of different ways that I could word, the commencement date versus the delivery date if we want to accomplish x. And we could just sit here and play with Chechi Beatty and go through that and kind of gamify like what you're saying, like, Dude, I mean, as commercial real estate brokers, you have this assistant that has a million years of experience in commercial real estate. Now, of course, you want to go out and verify all that experience. But I mean, if you're gonna sit there, I mean, there's so many different things that You could come up with to make sure that you're you're looking at things creatively or kind of, you know, covering all of your bases, if nothing else. So maybe we should talk about that offline and see if we can come up with a little episode that it'd be kind of Yeah, man.
50:11
I mean, I'll give one really interesting use case when I was bringing on all of these brokers, you know, I have them sign independent contractor agreements and NDAs. And NCAA is and all these different things. Well, you know, a couple of them are pretty seasoned, and they were like, hey, you know, this part, this part? And this part, we need to reevaluate. I was like, Okay, well, I need to turn this around pretty quickly. Am I going to actually go back to the attorney, so I loaded it up in a chat GPT. And I said, here's what he's trying to accomplish. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish, and spit out some new language, sent that over to him. Got it signed that day, and we move forward. Right? So it's just powerful, man. It's really interesting stuff.
50:48
It makes so much sense. I love it. Logan, this has been an awesome February Business Review. appreciate everybody for joining us all, you know, nearly 60 of you at one time, which is really cool to say that there are so many people interested in this. And you know what, Logan? What's cool is that this doesn't include any of the viewers from LinkedIn. For whatever reason, the only 10 Does it actually. Yeah, it doesn't actually show any viewers live. So
51:12
I was gonna say I was like, maybe it's because I posted it up before we went, but no, I don't get any. I don't get any attribution for those. Yeah,
51:21
I don't know why. I mean, I'm sure we're getting a whole bunch of people watching it there. But yeah, for whatever reason, it doesn't actually pull through the actual viewers. But yeah, appreciate you all joining us. We will be back live next month for the March business update. And I have a feeling that things are gonna start to take off in March. So tune in. We'll see you on the next one. This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by cre launch Pro. This online commercial real estate program is designed to take you from beginner to pro commercial real estate investor with access to all of my courses, our online community and monthly group coaching calls on how to confidently buy your first commercial property today at www dot c r e launch pro.com
In this episode, we'll discuss best practices for structuring real estate partnerships, including the importance of defining roles, negotiating equity splits based on each partner's value, and considering alternatives like debt financing to avoid unnecessary partnerships and keep more upside for yourself. Common pitfalls like failing to properly vet partners are also highlighted.