Rainmakers

Tell me about being the Chief Learning Officer of The Goodlife Team.

I started my real estate career in Dallas, working for the North Texas region of Keller Williams Realty. While working in Dallas, I had the opportunity to coordinate training events and Gary Keller would come and teach classes. I have always had a passion for knowledge, education and training. After two years, I had the opportunity to move to Austin to work for Gary Keller and Mo Anderson at KWRI. I helped the organization build, grow and develop Keller Williams University.

While working at Keller Williams, I met Krisstina who was a mega agent and master trainer. My role at Keller Williams meant that I had interaction with many of the mega agents and since Krisstina was in Austin, we were able to meet face-to-face. We discovered that we had running in common and we began to run together on a daily basis and our friendship grew from many miles on the running trail. We talked repeatedly about working together and we had many conversations about the future of the real estate industry. After several years at KWRI, I decided to leave and spent several years as a consultant. I worked with several different companies and helped them design sales systems to help their salespeople be more effective in order to increase revenue. .

As I built my consulting practice, Krisstina and I began to write a business plan that would enable us to scale her operation. After completing the business plan, we realized that it was time for me to join her real estate team. I quickly got my real estate license and joined the team full-time. Our vision is to build the model we envision inside the Goodlife Team and eventually expand the operation outside of Austin. .

My role includes producing sales for the team and acting as Chief Learning Officer. This means I am in the trenches on a daily basis and can build systems and document the standard practices that make our team one of the most successful operations in Austin, Texas. Our goal is to build an operation that is focused on technology and enables us to attract the top agents in our area because we produce leads and they are pushed out to our team members in a systemized manner. Our brokerage lowers the cost of our agents a adopting and adapting the necessary technology tools to effectively compete in the next generation of real estate. For example, we are currently changing our contact management system, Top Producer®, because we know it will not meet our needs for the future.

You talk on the office’s blog about getting your real estate license in three weeks and now also working as an agent. Is that fun?

Sometimes I think I live my live backwards. I have been in the real estate industry for over 10 years in a variety of capacities: writer, trainer, educator, regional manager, office owner, coach, and consultant but I had never done real estate sales. Now, for me to be effective in my role, I have decided to focus on sales as part of the strategy to help fulfill the vision we have for the organization. I am face-to-face with buyers and sellers every day, working the leads and observing where we can be more powerful as a team in order to compete more effectively to increase revenue and ultimately be #1 in Austin. Here's a blog post. 

You have a blog post about how business communication has evolved from calling and mailing and e-mailing, to the new social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Explain how that works for you as a member of The Goodlife Team.

As an agent there aren’t enough hours in a day to learn these new technology tools, lead-generate and still work with buyers and sellers in a way that takes care of the customer. Krisstina, Garry and I constitute the strategy for the team and we standardize the tactics needed to fulfill the strategy. Then we bring it to our agents, teach them what to do, how to do it and then they execute and implement. This means they can focus on what they do best – work with buyers and sellers. For instance, Twitter is more than just telling people what you had for breakfast. If agents are using social media tools without being strategic, they could be wasting valuable time, energy and resources which lowers their productivity and ultimately produces negative ROI. That is why we have created a social-media strategy and given it to our agents to implement. We tell them what to say on Facebook and Twitter, we teach them how to use social-media tools to generate business and increase their identity and we lower their costs because they don’t have to take the time to figure out which tools to use. Whether we like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are part of the evolution of technology that consumers are driving. On a larger scale, Facebook and Twitter are tools that the next technology tools will evolve from.

We have a standardized message we help team members convey, and we help them develop relationships through social media in order to produce leads and increase their identity. We call it the “Goodlife Lab” because innovation is happening so fast that we are designing, implementing and measuring effectiveness with new tools and systems on a daily basis to meet the demands of the consumer – the buyers and sellers in the marketplace.

The team has a definite culture and we are very specific about who we recruit to join the team. For instance, one member had his own brokerage but he could see where the industry was going and knew that he could not do it alone. He has done very well with us because he can focus on what he does best and leave the rest to us.

So our calling you a “Rainmaker” is not entirely accurate because you are not really generating the business for the brokerage – the brokerage is generating leads for you. But at the same time, your social-media relationships will add to the team’s synergy and boost its lead-generation strategy.

I am a rainmaker in the fact that one part of my lead generation strategy is to produce my own leads through my sphere of influence and help Krisstina design new lead-generation strategies at a brokerage level. One of the competitive advantages of being at the Goodlife Team is the brokerage is constantly innovating through Internet lead-generation and social-media strategies that are executed at a brokerage level, which produces leads for each member on the team.

Email Kelly