Hire Slow?!? Not Here! How #FastRealEstate Added 100 Agents and 9 Offices in 1 Year

Hire slow, fire fast. It’s a common growth philosophy used by real estate teams and brokerages everywhere. But not in Oakland, where #FastRealEstate lived up to its name by adding 100 agents and opening 9 offices in a single year. A pandemic year at that!

On this week’s Walkthrough, team leader Kenny Truong shares why and how he grew his HomeLight Elite Team so big, so fast, and the strategic decisions guiding every new office he opens.

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Links and Show Notes

• KennyTruong.com – Kenny’s real estate website
• JoinTeamFast.com – the recruiting website Kenny mentions in this episode
• #FastRealEstate on YouTube – as Kenny mentioned in this episode, anyone can watch their recorded team meetings
• Kenny Truong – real estate agent profile on HomeLight
• Join our Facebook community for The Walkthrough listeners
• HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
• Subscribe and listen to The Walkthrough: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube

Full Transcript

(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host)

[Sound: person swimming]

Swim against the tide. It’s one of the more common ideas you’ll hear in the world of motivational speaking. Do your own thing. Don’t follow the crowd. Zig, when others zag.

You’ve heard stuff like this before. But hearing it is one thing, doing it is something else. In the real world, it takes some courage to swim against the tide, especially in the middle of a health pandemic.

Over the past year, we’ve all heard the stories about businesses downsizing, shedding employees. We’ve wondered, especially in real estate, where so much of your work happens on the go, we’ve wondered if offices are even necessary anymore.

Today, you’re going to meet an agent who spent the past year swimming against the tide and doing it in spectacular fashion. He didn’t just grow his business. He added 100 agents and opened nine offices in the span of 12 months, and he has no plans to stop growing anytime soon. It’s the story of Kenny Truong, and the appropriately named, #FastRealEstate.

This is The Walkthrough.

(INTRO MUSIC)

Hello, hello, my name is Matt McGee. I’m the editor of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center. Welcome to The Walkthrough. This is a weekly podcast. We have new episodes that come out every Monday morning. This is the show where you’ll learn what’s working right now from the best real estate agents and industry experts in the country.

At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.

Do you want to get involved in the show or get in touch with me? There’s a couple different ways you can do that. Number one, find me in our Facebook listener community. Just go to Facebook, do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough. It’ll come right up. You can also leave a voicemail or send me a text. The number to use is 415-322-3328. Or you can send an email directly to my inbox. The address to use is walkthrough [at] homelight.com.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “hire slow, fire fast.” Heck, that phrase has come up a few times in our 50 some odd episodes of The Walkthrough. Some of you may recall hearing that.

Kenny Truong didn’t listen to those episodes, and good thing too, because if he had listened and followed that advice, things would probably be really really different for him today.

Here’s the story. Early last year, Kenny was with Climb Real Estate, an innovative independent brokerage based in San Francisco. You may have heard about them in the news. When Realogy bought Climb and folded it into Coldwell Banker, Kenny had some decisions to make. Go to Coldwell. Go to another big franchise brand. Find another indie brokerage to join, or even go out on his own. I’ll tell you what he chose in just a moment.

Two months after all of those changes, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I know I don’t need to remind you what that was like, the shutdowns, the debate over whether you’re essential and all that stuff.

Fast forward to today, Kenny’s business is soaring. The choice he made, well, he’s with eXp, and he’s built a successful brand based on speed. The brand name is #FastRealEstate and Kenny has his own team inside of that, called #TeamFast. They did $127 million in volume last year, and they’re on pace for $600 million in volume this year. With numbers like that, you probably won’t be surprised to know that Kenny is a HomeLight Elite Agent. He’s part of the top 1% of agents on our platform.

On today’s show, Kenny is going to share this incredible story of growth, rapid growth. You’ll hear him talk about

• why and how he added 100 agents in 12 months
• the strategic approach that he’s taking to finding new office space
• his really, really unique, open book approach to recruiting agents and much much more

That’s all coming up and then stay tuned to the very very end of today’s show. I have a One More Minute segment that I will share with you.

For now, let’s get started — 100 agents and nine offices in one year, a pandemic year. Here’s my conversation with Kenny Truong.

(BEGIN CONVERSATION)

Matt McGee: Take me back to last March, a year ago, and I want to know what your mindset was. Did you intentionally set out to grow your team so large, so quickly?

Kenny Truong: I think some part of me knew that I’d be growing it. Some background information, I was at Climb Real Estate prior to this company. I think that company has peaked maybe like 270 agents or so. They got acquired by Realogy in the third year I was there and the fifth year they folded the company. They shut down the brand, I think they just took what they need to learn from and brought it to Coldwell Banker and it kind of gained a lot of life into that brand. At that company, my five years there, I recruited close to 70 agents to the company. So I’ve naturally been doing this at my last company. So when I started it doing here, it wasn’t like something I intentionally went on my way to do. I just naturally attract people through social media and how I practice business.

So I had a feel, I mean, I was planting seeds. I knew that the more exposure you have, the more influence you have. The more influence you have, you can leverage that into something which is typically attracting agents to the company. So that was not my original, like direct, I’m going to grow a massive team. In fact, I have my workbook from Tom Ferry Summit two years ago, technically. And I wrote in that book, I want to have 20 team members on my team, I want to do a million GCI, you know. Not even that, just CI. My big picture was like, I’m going to have 20 agents on my team. So no, this, what I built out was not… I mean, later on, we’re national, like hell yeah, let’s do this, let’s get to a hundred. And now like, okay, let’s get to 250. So I like setting goals for yourself. We are going so fast. Well, I have 40 now, might as well go for 80 and a hundred. So back in March, no, not even like any interest in growing a hundred agent operation. It also sounds ridiculous.

Matt McGee: You knew you were going to grow but it wasn’t like you had a line item on your goal sheet, you know, reach a hundred agents by such and such date. It just happened.

Kenny Truong: Yeah, for sure.

Matt McGee: So you have added about a hundred agents over the last 12 months, in a time of, you know, real uncertainty in the real estate market because of the pandemic and all that going on. Why have you grown so large, so fast?

Kenny Truong: You’re like, when things all shut down, companies can’t do anything. You can’t do staging, you can’t do open houses, you can’t show homes. Everyone was at a standstill. I think what I did really effectively was I got lucky enough to be on two big masterminds with top producers because people were starting to, you know, put together things. Hey, this is kind of cool, what if I did my own? And during that time simultaneously from March to June… yeah, March to early June, things were starting to calming down. I had featured on over 35 webinars and I also put on about 35 webinars myself. Hosting different topics like top 1% Alameda County, top 1% Contra Costa County, top team leaders in California, top teams across the nation, team-rich models, tech tools, kinda like my own Inman startup kind of thing.

Yeah, so during that time, I did massive and at one time, we had like 250 people on these masterminds or webinars, and I promoted the heck out of that and had people on the calls promote that. And then I live-streamed from Zoom to Facebook, and I tagged every single person on those calls. So every time we had a webinar, it was like 12-20 different people, mostly local top agents that were featured. So I was able to put myself out there. Like, there’s really no one in the Bay Area if they’re on Facebook that didn’t know who I am because I tagged every single person that was a top producer in the market. So during that time I got to really showcase what I knew about real estate. I think a lot of times people think that I just go to these big conferences and party all day and referral, but I actually know things. So it’s kind of cool to really, like, showcase that and for these things, it’s kind of interesting. We have 16 to 20 people on the call, you know, and the things are an hour to 90 minutes long. I’m only speaking for like five minutes but I put it together. So I got to moderate the conversations and kept it moving so that early on they got me a lot of exposure. So I think when you fast forward to June, July when things are still at a standstill, especially corporate brokerages were very careful about you know, don’t do this or, you know, stay in your homes, be safe, all that. You know, we were a little bit bold. So I think agents were tired and were looking for leadership or some advice or some strategy or something, right.

Matt McGee: It sounds like the beginning of the pandemic being visible on all these webinars, in the community, with other agents, that was sort of the impetus that attracted people to you. Got your name, got your visibility in your local agent community.

Kenny Truong: In June, when I hired my first independent agent, I supported them more like a broker than a team. So being able to kind of grow that and have different options for people coming in, layered on top of what I was building out on Slack. You know, social media is how many many agents were in a business last year, since open houses still to this day, right now, are not legal. Door knocking is not legal, but some people are doing it, you know, you still can’t hang out with people. We’re just in red tier, which is the first tier. We reset back in December because cases spiked, went back down, shut back down. Now we’re still in that very first tier. Things are opening up … so during that time, like being on social media was a really great way to get in front of people. And as we were kind of working into the business last year, we were very, very busy and people caught wind and saw that we were very busy. And we were keeping a really tight culture and having a lot of fun. And people came to the office with, you know, with their discretion and they came and we continue to grow and build while everyone was just shut down. And by August, I think I have like 80 agents and we’re picking up 10 to 15 agents a month. And then I think in the end of the year… no, if I count onboarding, kind of in that little gray area of two weeks when people were coming on, applying, we were about 90 agents deep in January. Fast forward a year, March now, like we are about roughly about 115 agents.

Matt McGee: Let me jump in here to add some background on what you just heard. Kenny mentioned that he hired his first independent agent last June, and of these 100 new agents overall that he’s added in the past year, some are part of his team and some are not.

So here’s the scoop. Kenny is with eXp as I mentioned earlier. He runs his company with two different business models. He has #FastRealEstate, which operates like a brokerage within the eXp brokerage, about 70 of his agents are part of that model. They’re the independent agents. Then he also has #TeamFast, which is his own team. The other 45 or so agents are part of that.

Now, dramatically growing his agent count wasn’t the only way that Kenny swam against the tide over the past year. At a time when many brokers and many agents were wondering if you’d ever need offices again, Kenny went from having zero offices to nine right now. He grabbed office number one last June and since then, he’s added a mix of big offices and small offices, even a couple coworking spaces. Oakland is still home base, but #FastRealEstate is expanding out to smaller towns and cities in the East Bay. His most recent office, in fact, just opened a couple months ago in Sacramento. As we get back to the conversation, Kenny explains that he’s been choosing each office location in a very strategic way.

Kenny Truong: So these city retail spaces in Hayward and Hercules and Brentwood are all next to all the new construction, are all next to the new apartment buildings. They’re not areas which big brands like a Coldwell Banker or Compass has that much interest in going because they’re not major metro but we’re going where the secondary markets are. So, one thing I learned from Climb Real Estate, forgot what the exact slogan was but they grew in District 9 in San Francisco and they went to well over a billion dollar company. It was like … something like “Your First Home” or something but Climb Real Estate agents were like along the path with you as you’re growing your life. So they capture a lot of repeat business. So we’re going to these new markets to kind of capture that business because our agents are there and our buyers are there. So when the market… give me three or four years, we’ll pick up a ton of the listings in those secondary markets.

Matt McGee: I’m glad you mentioned that because I was intending to ask, where are you putting all these people? And it sounds like, if I heard you right, one office a year ago, are you now working on what, the 9th or 10th office and strategically targeting developing areas.

Kenny Truong: The co-working spaces are exclusively for our team-team but then the bigger box areas are the secondary market which we’re trying to attract other agents to either join our team or eXp and then having these big hubs as… and the strategy behind that too is also not only because our secondary markets where our clients are going to, but also where we became the first Zillow Flex Team in East Bay. And they show this really cool heat map where you’re going to get leads at and Pinole was dark-dark green which was right next to Hercules, five minutes away, and then Antioch was dark green, which was right next to Brentwood and then San Ramon, we’re not quite at San Ramon yet, it’s a really niche high end market. But we looked at a space over there in WeWork but we weren’t quite ready yet. So we’re being smart about agent, buyer, buyer movement – one. Where our agents live and play at, two. And three Zillow Flex. It just so happens they landed on all these three hubs. So we’re growing where business is going to be coming a lot versus fighting for the same business, you know, the piece of pie shrank a lot in the city of Oakland or Berkeley or whatnot over here. So we’re going pretty far with our geographic reach.

Matt McGee: How do you describe the Fast Agent team culture?

Kenny Truong: Um, it’s a very fun, dynamic, fast paced culture, like our median age is probably like 29 but we have people all across the board, and I think we speak 18 different languages. We’re super supportive of each other, we use Slack for everything. So there’s like, like tons of messages popping in and out all day on Slack. And you know, everyone knows each other from Zoom. There’s like many times where I met agents in real life and like wait, we haven’t actually met yet. Stop and think and shake hands because like, we’ve been talking on Zoom so much. Really just doing things you’re supposed to do but people were slow to pivot, I mean, you hear that word a lot. But we were truly pivoting.

We experimented with things like hey, let’s just keep a Zoom Room open all day and it went well for a couple weeks. Like you know what, this is not very practical. At that time my Director of Operations was overwhelmed. People just hop in and talk all day, which is fun, right? Be able to keep building culture and later on, we kind of adjusted over time. We ended up starting… we started doing probably by July, we started doing weekly team meetings on Tuesdays at 10…I can actually go back and check… actually, no, I should know this. But we start having weekly team meetings so there’s a lot of fun like, rah rah [speaker makes noise like he’s having fun], shout each other out and that raw excitement. I think later on, maybe around like, October, we started having like open Zoom Room, 12 to 1. People come in, they just hang out, talk to each other, build the culture, right? Keep building culture. And then on Fridays at 3:00, they were pretty well attended early on. Where like maybe like 15 people came on Friday, three o’clock, we just have open training on anything. Whether there’s a CMA or like that strategy or email template, just open discussion. Now, we don’t really do that as much anymore, even though we have that because the Zoom Room keeps that conversation open throughout the week when people ask things, and then we record everything. So we have a huge database of things for people to watch and read.

Matt McGee: Would all of this have been possible without a really strong team culture?

Kenny Truong: I don’t think so, I think you need a good foundation. So our core 10 or 12 is kind of the heart of the company and we have like great agents on my team. We’ve always been great at gathering people, when we don’t hear from people. This is our last company, they’ll text them just checking in. So having that was a big part of our growth. And then in the end we’re posting on social media, what we’re doing, we’re having fun, we have zoom calls. My company doesn’t have any Zoom calls, except to give us you know, things that tell us to stay out of trouble, right, you know, like, I don’t know like, the policies and CR updates. Like that’s not really that fun.

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Matt McGee: Who are the agents you’ve added? Are they mostly new? Are they experienced? Have they come from other offices?

Kenny Truong: If you guys check out jointeamfast.com, you can actually see our entire roster you see their name, phone number, Instagram handle email address, which company they came from, who their eXp sponsor is and whether they’re a new agent or not. So on our roster, about 25 agents are brand new, so a quarter of our company is brand new. We originally… you know like as a newer team or company, if you don’t have much market share or influence… you’re attracting new agents. New agents are easiest people to attract, right, because they they’re shopping and you got something decent, they’re going to land with you.

During that phase, we start bringing on solo independent agents, you know, other independent agents caught wind, especially the top agents that are like open house based with no business. We were still paying for Zillow. Like we were in two grand spend in January by the way, we actually decreased like crazy, but then it was so good we kept increasing our spend because we were getting good ROI on it. Agents were looking to us. Like one company with over I think 25 agents… I say acquire, but they moved over to Compass and were powered by Compass. Eight of their agents left and we picked up like six of them, maybe seven, I think and then two left and went completely independent.

So as agents were moving around, very unhappy with their current brokerage. You know, there was a lot of movements last year, we were a top contender, to at least have that conversation with people. So we’ve been getting a lot of seasoned agents. In fact, between November and now, we probably picked up like six or seven people doing well over almost $8 million a year. The more we have proven success with our agents, showing these new agents are crushing it the more seasoned agents coming over. Like Hey, what are you doing? I’m really doing well. Why do you think agents do better than us? And then they come to our meeting. We have a really amazing team meeting every Tuesday and everything’s recorded so any agents shopping us are going to check it out. So we’ve been doing a great job getting much much more experienced agents right now.

Matt McGee: So an agent that is not currently with you can just tune in to this Tuesday meeting, just to sort of get a flavor of what’s going on.

Kenny Truong: Yeah, last Tuesday was our most well-attended meeting. We had 84 people on. Imagine we have like a little over a hundred agents and a lot of part timers. So, really we have 90 agents but to have 84 people on a meeting is a pretty big deal. Last week, I think we had like 14 guests that I know about because we shout out the guests too if they are okay with it unless you want to remain anonymous, because for various reasons. We did that… so a guest comes on, they love the energy and then our funnel, our incubation funnel, I have shown many people how we do it, is our Slack is very exciting. Slack, that’s where every communication is for our company. So rather than me to tell someone what the culture is and talk about it, come to our Slack, see every message that goes through, you can see how our company operates. And then either before or after Slack, we get them on a team meeting, and they get a taste of the culture. And then we actually have every single meeting recorded since August, so we send that.

So our meetings like… we’re converting people before they even hop on the call with us. When they hop on call with us to see the format of our meetings. Our meetings is always drop your wins in the channel, it starts off with really high energy, then we have a quick learning moment, and then we recognize every agent that got as escrow in that week. This week was our biggest week yet, every week is our biggest week yet. We have 24 new escrows at about $18 million in the last seven days. So everyone, one by one, goes through their escrow, how they got it, you know whatever that looks like, we recognize them. And then we always give a shout-out to one cool story of the week. This story of the week is Dewey’s first million-dollar deal, someone bought their mama a house. Like just different things that are like usually emotional. It’s really cool and just get keeps the energy very high. Then we talk like new training for the week and then at the end, we kind of like have a big question. Today was like, well, today was like a really funny question. So my sales manager leads the meeting, he has high energy. We have not [inaudible] his level. It was, if there was a chapter in your real estate life what would it be called? And everyone drops something funny. Last week was like, you know, what’s one marketing plan you’re working on? Or what’s one thing like, something cool. So it’s just the pace, the pace of the meeting is really high energy. We try to knock it out within like an hour.

Matt McGee: So between letting prospective agents tune into the weekly meeting, see what’s going on in your Slack… I mean, you’re taking just a total open book approach to this.

Kenny Truong: Yeah, what I’ve learned is it’s full transparency is the best way because like I was trying to explain everything in the traditional whether you’re talking to a Coldwell Banker or Keller Williams or whatnot, right. For you to sit down, and you don’t have any experience of the company. They only have a half an hour, an hour to pitch you. It’s hard to talk, like do you talk about splits? Do you talk about this? Well, we have everything laid out front. Our splits, our offices, our team meetings, our eXp stuff, the article “why I picked this company.” So like everything’s laid out. So hopefully by the time someone has to check us out, they spent like about five, six hours at least. They can even spend 30 hours and they won’t know everything there is about our company because it’s all laid out. So ideally, they spend multiple hours and by then we meet like… so what questions do you have? Great. Have you watched our meeting? Did you understand the culture? Uh, yeah, like this is something I’m looking for. We’re looking for collaboration and support and communication and cool marketing like okay, great. Because I can’t name another company in my market that has that. Which is crazy, right? Because every company has a set culture or a good for them, like a good brand, like KW and like the KW offices here have like three or four hundred agents and they do really well but you know what you’re expecting when you go there. You know what you’re expecting if you’re going to BHG. You know, typically know what you’re expecting when you go to Compass or KW. But there’s not many indie boutiques anymore and I consider us as an indie boutique and that we are establishing what our brand is.

Matt McGee: You have a very recognizable brand as well in your market. Has that been a help in terms of recruiting agents in?

Kenny Truong: Yeah, huge, I had a hundred bus benches in Oakland that just shows this logo back there, so it’s a pretty well-known brand. Last last year when growing our brand we grew #TeamFast so that #TeamFast sounds like a pretty cool brand, it’s hip you know, and then Powered by #FastRealEstate with new fresh marketing, I was like hey, I want to be a part of that. So my brand has been really strong to establish myself as a team leader and then the #TeamFast brand has a really big draw for younger newer agents coming in to have a fresh brand. And then the mature version of that brand is like #FastRealEstate Brokered by eXp. So, that brand in June, July, August, when people didn’t want to join a team, you know my team, #TeamFast or the Kenny Truong Team, Fast Agent Team… I don’t ever refer to my team as Kenny Truong Team that’s why we’ve grown so fast, but other people might. So people that wanted to look at our company but they didn’t want to be on #TeamFast or any team, they can come to #FastRealEstate Brokered by eXp. We want the agents… I think this is the future of teams, we want the agents to be completely independent in their branding, but be dependent on us in the backend. So from the front end it might not even look like there’s any affiliation. But if they choose to align with us and promote our brands, #TeamFast, #FastRealEstate, it makes recruiting way easy. Because you know, imagine you bring people to our team meetings, then they sign up versus you know, going out there like some knuckleheads at eXp cold-calling people or texting them. But you know what that is like, we don’t do that. We just bring people to our meeting, this is what we offer, check it out.

Matt McGee: Kenny I’ve had a fair number of team leaders on this podcast in the past and when we talk about hiring they always use this phrase, what is it? “Hire slow fire fast.”

Kenny Truong: [laughs]

Matt McGee: [laughs] And you start laughing when you hear that! You are not hiring slow.

Kenny Truong: When you’re talking about teams, I don’t know how other teams grow. I only know how I grew my team fast, so I don’t know how other people grow. And also, what I’ve seen other teams… because my girlfriend is with a different team. I had her interview with different teams like eight or nine last year and one thing we learned is most teams don’t run an operation. They just have people talking to them, they just do deals. They don’t have systems, they don’t have accountability, they don’t have set meetings, they don’t have like this, this, and this. So for us, you know, having specific roles on our team. We also have six virtual assistants and the virtual assistant helps us with the randomest tasks possible. But being organized… when people are coming in they’re almost like in a long term boot camp. Here’s the onboarding checklist, if you want this, this is what you have to do step by step, you come to the meetings, here’s the recorded training. So for us like we’re much more organized and I think that’s why we’re able to recruit.

Matt McGee: A couple quick notes before we wrap things up. Kenny will be the first to admit that all of this was not easy. You just heard him say that they run an organized operation now, but that was not the case early on. Logistics were a real struggle last summer. He was hiring staff to help with things like marketing, training, operations, all that stuff and Kenny says everyone was kind of stepping on each other’s toes, getting in each other’s way. Then they did a big restructuring in December and things have been smooth since then.

So as we wrapped up our conversation, I asked Kenny, what does the future look like? Well, he wants to keep adding agents. He wants to have an office in like every city, he says, and he wants to create more wealth opportunities for the people that are part of #TeamFast and #FastRealEstate.

Kenny Truong: One thing as a leader right, I got this from KW, as you’re growing your ecosystem, the bigger you grow, the more room you get for everyone. So if I grow bigger, there’s more opportunity for teammates to rise and that my network… like if I was a $56 million team, great. Well, once I’m a billion-dollar team by next year, well, there’s going to be many many $56 million teams in my company. It took me 10 years to get there. I can get people there like 2,3,4 years. And then as we get bigger, overall, the team members get bigger and they’ll attract more and more people.

So I feel like you know, we’re really growing our dream company and brokerage exactly the way we want to grow it, which is not unheard of. And you know, I make fun of other companies all the time on my social media, it was actually a big part of my recruiting. But it feels really good to put a dent in some other companies that have completely just crushed our market where that looks like and to do something different because, like, rise of the indie, right? I feel like we’re the first brand ever to make… I mean, probably in the nation to ramp up to a hundred team members in a year. But like, all these companies are doing it their way, we’re coming in here the underdogs is completely coming, crushing it. To go from $56 million team to, sorry, $120 million team first year, to a billion-dollar company within two years is just crazy. And imagine all the opportunities that will open from that.

(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host)

And talking about agent success, like Kenny just was there at the end, you might be wondering, how successful are the agents on Kenny’s team? That’s a fair question. Here’s an answer. When we spoke a few weeks back, Kenny had just done an audit. Forty of the first 50 agents that they added were in production. They had a total of 89 escrows pending and three quarters of those were on the buyer side. Of the 115 agents total that were onboard, Kenny says he and his sales manager identified about 20 that they needed to check in with and get on track. So swimming against the tide and succeeding, great stuff. Kenny Truong, thank you so much for joining me on this episode.

All right, One More Minute is coming up at the very very end of the show. For now, let’s do our takeaways segment.

Takeaway number one, Kenny’s recruiting was almost an accident. He did dozens of webinars last year when the pandemic hit and that helped him become a household name among the agents in the Oakland and East Bay Areas.

Takeaway number two, while a lot of us wonder if offices are even necessary, Kenny grew to nine offices over the past year and did it very strategically. He wants to be in towns where there’s little competition, there’s a lot of apartments and new construction, and where his team is already getting a lot of leads.

Takeaway number three, he is basically an open book when it comes to recruiting. Even before joining, agents can listen in on team meetings, they can read through the company Slack to learn about the team culture, how the team operates and Kenny says that makes the recruiting much, much easier.

Takeaway number four, there’s a big focus on culture. Kenny describes it as dynamic and fast paced, he says everyone is connected. They do regular meetings, the staff hosts Zoom Rooms, they just have lots and lots of communication. Only eight agents have left #FastRealEstate over the last year and seven of those are agents that moved to other markets.

Alright, if you have questions or feedback about this episode, you can leave a voicemail or send me a text, the number is 415-322-3328. You can send an email, it’s walkthrough [at] homelight.com, or find me in our Facebook listener community, just go to Facebook, do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough, and the group will come right up.

That’s all for this week. Thanks to Kenny Truong for joining me and thank you for listening. My name is Matt McGee, and you’ve been listening to The Walkthrough. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.

Go out and safely sell some homes. I’ll talk to you again next week. Bye bye.

(OUTRO MUSIC) 

Welcome back, time for another One More Minute segment.

Today I want to share a quote from Harlan Coben. Do you recognize that name? Harlan Coben. He’s a prolific New York Times bestselling author, 30 plus books, several of which have been turned into movies and TV shows.

He was on Clubhouse about a month ago, talking about the writing process. I want you to listen to what he said about self-doubt. Here’s the quote. He said, “I have written 33 books and every book I thought I sucked. The key is to turn off the voice that paralyzes you when you write your first draft. Just write. You can always fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages.”

I know writing and real estate are different but I also know self-doubt can affect all of us — real estate agents, podcasters, you name it. “Turn off the voice that paralyzes you. Just write. You can always fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages.”

Keep that in mind. Change pages to whatever you might be working on, a new video, a marketing plan, new scripts, whatever it might be, turn off the voice that paralyzes you. Just get it done.

That’s One More Minute. I’m Matt McGee, thanks for listening. See you next week with another Walkthrough.

Header Image Source: (Kenny Truong)