What does it take to average 24 transactions per agent? How about being up by double digits during the pandemic? How do you create a culture of success in your real estate brokerage? How important is your real estate brokerage CRM?
Listen in as Brenda Tushaus joins our VP of Product to discuss these questions and more!
TRANSCRIPT
Katie Ragusa: Welcome. Hi, Brenda. So for the whole group, just a little bit of background on Brenda and what we’re going to be talking about today, she is the CEO of Minnesota based Re/max Results. They have 42 offices and over 1200 throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. She became the CEO of the company in twenty eighteen and has been in real estate for twenty four years. So she’s got a huge background based on the 2020 Real Trends, 500 report, Re/max results of the country’s largest Re/max franchise and the 13th largest brokerage for total transactions. So lots of big stats there. Hopefully I got everything right, Brenda. Anything I missed. All right. OK. Quite a profile. So you represent a major company. So what we’re going to talk about today is getting into growing a company, recruiting good people and not just bringing them on, but keeping them around. So thanks for being with us today and sharing what you know now.
Brenda Tushaus: Thanks for having me!
Katie Ragusa: So let’s kind of go backwards in time a little bit. And you guys are forty two offices. Yeah, we just we just grew to about forty two and we’ll talk more about that from forty one to forty two. But so when you started with the company it was three offices I think. So looking back, what are the foundational pieces that makes Re/max results who you are that have stayed the course through all of those years.
Brenda Tushaus: So we yeah. When I started I’ve been at the company now 19 years. We had one hundred and fifty agents or so and three offices. And I’ve obviously held a variety of roles through the years. And I was just looking at our stats just recently and in the last 19 years we’ve done 15 acquisitions. So that’s been a part, a major part of our growth. Obviously recruiting is just as important, but the acquisitions, that chunky growth, that that helps as well.
So as far as I will tell you, one thing that I discovered when I was looking at some of this recently is most of the acquisitions we had one big one when I was about two or three years into the role that doubled the size of the brokerage. It brought on about three hundred associates. But since then, our acquisitions have been really small, chunky growth. They’ve been anywhere from 20 to 50 associates that we that we add each time. So very small, small acquisitions and is not more intentional.
Katie Ragusa: Like what would your advice be to those who want to get big, fast and double in size? Triple in size, really?
Brenda Tushaus: Well, it depends on what you can afford. So it just depends on what, what you’re looking to acquire and how much you can pay. And so the small the smaller ones through the years have worked for us. We did have a year. It was I think it was twenty seventeen where we added we did about six or seven acquisitions that year and those were a bunch of small ones than we did one in twenty, eighteen, twenty nineteen.
We had to just kind of catch our breath and now we’re back in twenty in full on growth mode again. Right. So yet another broker and market that’s booming in these times. So that’s really great to see.
Katie Ragusa: And inspiring. So you just had the 15th acquisition literally just it earlier this week or last week of that. What was that like? Can you tell us more about that process?
Brenda Tushaus: Yeah. So that we acquired another Re/max franchise was Re/max first choice in the La Crosse, Wisconsin market. They have three offices and thirty two associates that we acquired with that recent transaction. And and I’ll tell you one thing, and we announced this when we did the all company meeting and we did the the acquisition on Tuesday is we told everyone in the room they are the highest per agent productivity acquisition we’ve ever done. They average about thirty five sides per agent. So I was small but very, very productive company. And, you know, our history and that productivity number is really important to us. So that just helps make us, you know, I mean, we’re we’re we’re known for that now. We just added an acquisition that that improved upon that. So it went well. The meeting, it’s always a surprise to everyone in the room. And but we’ve done this, the dog and pony show, I guess you could call it so many times that were those of us on my team are pretty comfortable with it.
And nobody got up and walked out of the room in tears and and there were some applause. And they were happy that they know us. And they knew that their former broker owners were looking to retire in coming years. And so everyone it was we were really welcomed in. And I’ll tell you the other thing is we kept on the staff. We kept on the broker owners. And that’s really important in every acquisition is that we we don’t change a lot.
We don’t change economics. We don’t change traditions or office culture or whatever is important. And we always try to keep on those those former broker owners and some sort of a capacity in this case, one up them staying on as a managing broker for us.
Katie Ragusa: So they’ve built trust with that company and you’re not going to shake everything up. And RACT recruited them or acquired them for a reason. That’s something good going. So everybody left that. Thirty five sides for Agent Sinkin. So that brings me to the question of you can’t do that part time. So tell me about on whether it’s an acquisition or recruiting a specific person and sales executive. What kind of time are they putting into their real estate career for you to even consider?
Brenda Tushaus: Well, definitely full time. You know, we always say we don’t we don’t hire part time. We don’t hire part time sales executives. Now, I will have a few Re/max results associates that come to me and say I only work X number of hours a week. Yet somehow they’re still killing it in real estate sales. But we don’t when you come to work at Re/max results, you don’t have another job full time or part time job.
You come to work at our company and you are a full time real estate agent. That’s really important. And we do have minimum expectations as far as our sales executives performance. Do people fall below those minimum expectations? Of course they do. Do we fire them if they fall below those? Not typically. We work with them and get them into coaching or accountability groups. We’re never going to say, hey, it’s time for you to move on.
If we don’t see them trying, we don’t see them working to get their production up.
Katie Ragusa: So I would imagine that those metrics aren’t secret, that you’re just standing by and watching them like they’re recruited for a reason. They were in a player, top producer. They know what they’re expected to come in and do it, right?
Brenda Tushaus: Yeah. And it’s it’s funny, you know, we have several people at the company that do our recruiting. And sometimes they do encounter conversations when they’re talking to sales executives at other brokerages. There’s that perception like, well, am I good enough to join Re/max result? I secretly I love that. But I also don’t want people to think like, well, I could never go work there because I don’t sell enough real estate. Really, it’s we have to prove to them, like, no, you can’t work for Re/max results and you will sell more real estate and we’ll show you how so and just that environment of being around other people with the same philosophy.
Katie Ragusa: It’s not like you’re carrying the brokerage for sales volume and all the rankings that you get. Everybody is contributing towards that goal. So, I mean, as an agent, I can only imagine what that’s like to work in that environment. So you’ve got a lot of acquisitions under your belt on, a lot of recruiting going on. You guys are a large brokerage. So how do you manage this? Who on your staff handles recruiting? Who handles and sources acquisitions? can you describe those different pieces and who’s managing what?
Brenda Tushaus: So our executive team at Re/max Results is it’s myself. I have a CEO, a CFO and a general manager. That’s the four of us. And then the general manager oversees a team of six regional managers or managing brokers. And the regional managers are managing brokers then are the ones that oversee three to four offices in their wing, depending on how many agents are in those offices. And it’s the managing brokers slash regional managers. We have two different titles that are the ones that are responsible for well, all of us are responsible for retention, but recruiting and retention and of course, sales while transactional support.
So a typical regional manager would say they have three or four offices as their territory. They might have three or four offices and anywhere from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty agents. And 80 percent of their time is expected to be spent on recruiting and retention, kind of split 50/50. So 40 percent of their time recruiting, 40 percent retention relationships, customer service. So that 80 percent on that and then 20 percent on just general support, sales support, answering questions, helping with transactions, coaching, training.
Katie Ragusa: You’ve got a great team that you trust and everybody knows their role. So a lot of this, you said 40 percent or so out of 80 percent of their time, about 40, 40, half and half recruiting retention is it is one harder than the other?
Brenda Tushaus: About recruiting is really hard. It’s really hard. And I used to be I don’t know how many years ago, but I was once director of recruiting at Re/max Results and in and a really good year for me. I recruited about forty, forty five agents. That’s really hard. We like to see our regional managers recruit about twenty four or more. That’s kind of a goal. We say if you can recruit two people a month, sometimes it’s more than that, sometimes it’s less. But recruiting is hard and it’s getting harder.
It’s getting harder, I would say within the last oh probably within the last three years. Just there’s just always new competition, new business models and retention is just as hard.
Katie Ragusa: So you have to it’s difficult to invest the time both places. It sounds like that number twenty four to a month might be like your sweet spot, your number, because I think that’s also where your typical agent follows in transactions, right? Yep.
Look, easy metrics or so, and that’s where you guys keep these rankings is everybody has those metrics in mind. You’re hitting those monthly, you know, are you behind are you on track or are you ahead? So you mentioned you’re not going to fire somebody if they’re a little bit behind, you’re going to coach them up and intervene. So when do you intervene? Like, what is that time? Is it after the year closes and you’re looking back on their previous year? Is it midway through?
Brenda Tushaus: We you know, I wish I would I wish honestly, I could say that we had like this end of quarter review. We try to do these quarterly reviews of production. It doesn’t happen calendar quarter. It’s not an exact science. But we do pull reports for we do the we meaning executive team and people in our sales accounting department pull reports and produce those for the regional managers. We actually don’t make the regional managers do that, although most regional managers already have a pulse in their offices is might be struggling, but we pull those reports and we say, hey, you’ve got a couple of people here that it looks like their performance is down in the last 12 months or in the last X amount of time. So work with them, reach out to them, see what you can do to help them. And so, yeah, and again, it’s there’s so many factors that go into it. There’s so many, you know, twenty, twenty alone. It’s just been a crazy year, you know. So, you know, that was, that’s one thing. But, you know, you never know what’s going on in someone’s life. So they’re sensitive when Approach and sometimes we offer to put them into a coaching program. We’re pretty coach neutral. We like all coaching programs and we’ll do that on our dime. We’ll even offer to pay for because let’s say we have someone that’s worked for us for 10, 15 years and they’ve been a solid producer for years, but they’re just having an off year for whatever reason. We just we reinvest in them. So we do that. So I don’t know.
Does that answer the question?
Katie Ragusa: Yeah, for sure. I’m just hearing firsthand how you’re managing all of this and keeping everybody on top. I know you personally have face time or maybe some time these days, not with many of your recruits and agents and office visits and you’re all over the place. So with twelve hundred people and growing, how do you manage that time and keep everybody feeling connected?
Brenda Tushaus: Well, I do I’m coming to you from my desk in Eden Prairie, that’s our headquarters, and I’m lucky if I’m here once a week. I’m everywhere. I work from all of our offices as far as our outer markets. So we’ve got three offices in the Duluth Superior Market and we’ve got two down in Rochester Market. Now we’ve got the cross market, St. Cloud and so besides all the offices that are here in the Minneapolis St Paul in the Twin Cities area, I try to get to the other markets once a month and I’m pretty good at it. So I whether I have appointments with sales executives or whether I just go and I spend a couple of days and the Duluth superior market and I just make my way through the three offices, I’ll camp out in a conference room, I’ll walk around the offices.
I talk to everyone. I know them all. When someone new joins the company, I reach out with a private with just a personal BombBomb, welcoming them, introducing myself. It’s not prerecorded. I do a custom video sometimes I’m doing a lot of videos and just say, hey, welcome aboard.
I circle in with their regional manager before I reach out to them and I ask some questions like if there’s anything I need to know about them. And I might mention that on a video just to say, hey, I heard you joined this team or, you know, I heard something unique about you. And so I try to connect with them in that video and I generally get responses. And so I’m creating connections that way. But I I used to say I mean, years ago, I would say I, I knew 90 percent of our agents, but that’s because I was I was once director of I.T. and then I was director of recruiting.
I’ve held so many roles that I’ve worked so closely with sort of all of our agents. I know it’s kind of a weird combination. And now that I’m in the CEO role, as I have been for a couple of years, it’s a little bit harder to connect and I feel like fewer reach out to me because they are scared of being the CEO.
Yeah, I’m super approachable, but I feel like I’m you know, when I give out my cell phone number at a company meeting, they’re like, what are you nuts? But people don’t abuse that. They respect your time. So got it.
Katie Ragusa: Yeah. And I think that culture or that precedent figure setting a baseline and personalization and setting up on the person, get to know them, send them a custom bomb message that probably shines through to your agents and their communication with their customers because they’re getting it straight from the top, right?
Brenda Tushaus: Yeah.
Katie Ragusa: So what about you have a lot of long term sales executives that have been with your company and you have a lot of staff that’s been around for a while, too, including yourself.
So how do you keep good people once you find them?
Brenda Tushaus: Well, as far as staff goes, that’s one of the things at this recent acquisition, for example, we have a lot of our key employees that will travel down and we’ll all attend the this all company meeting where we announce the acquisition and we go around the room and we introduce ourselves and we say what we do and how long we’ve been at the company. And everyone is.
We introduce ourselves and we say what we do and how long we’ve been at the company and everyone is always like, wow, 11 years, 17 years, twenty two years. So we just you know, we I think we hire. Right. First of all, we hire happy people. We hire team players. We look for that kind of that, if that makes sense, that customer service mentality. Have you ever been in a restaurant and you get a waiter or waitress that’s just like amazing and you want to take away employee? My life is with Chick fil A. Yes, yes. Yes. So we hire people that just get it. You know the difference. You know, when there’s someone who’s negative that just doesn’t get that customer service mentality.
So I’m here to collect a paycheck rather than care about you. And so those people are generally also just happier people. You know, all we also run. We allow our employees have just autonomy in their roles, they know what their job duty is, but they have just freedom to just do their job and we leave them alone. We don’t micromanage.
Katie Ragusa: So not a lot of approvals needed. You trust their judgment because you picked them for a reason? Yeah. Taking away that barrier and allowing people to just shine can really help. And for the customer or the agent on the other side of that who’s waiting for that approval, it makes a big difference to them to you know, we’ve had staff and sales executives who have left the company and a large majority of them return.
Brenda Tushaus: So, you know, when it comes to sales executives, if a sales executive leaves, we make it as as peaceful as an exit as we possibly can. Of course, we don’t want them to leave, but we never want to burn any bridges because a lot of times I’m talking within six to 12 months they come back. And sometimes it isn’t always greener, so you need to realize that, you know, on their own.
Katie Ragusa: so and that is a less comfortable part to talk about. Running a business is people leaving. So how do you keep that relationship from souring? Do you hand them their data? Like, what is it about you guys that makes that easy?
Brenda Tushaus: Or pay for your pain. How do we make a painless if they leave? Yeah, well, we don’t. We don’t. If someone’s leaving, we don’t hold. We don’t hold on to their listings. We let them technically, the listings belong to the broker, but we don’t think they have those those files because those customers want to work with them. And so we don’t we allow them to cancel listings and take listings with them, that sort of thing. That’s always been a policy of ours. If they had any pending transactions, we honor whatever they would have been paid. We let them attend the closing. Still, if they want to attend the closing now, not a lot of people leave result. So I don’t want to sit here and talk about, you know.
Katie Ragusa: knowing how you handle that. Kind of helps with recruiting, too, because everybody in their mind, you’re trusting a new relationship and a new endeavor and and you have a lot of faith in but not built rapport yet, maybe or or you haven’t lived it firsthand. So knowing how you handle that, even if they never leave it, it just shows who you are as a company. So earlier you said you recruit team players and no pun intended, but you also recruit teams or at least you have a lot of them. So how many teams do you guys have right now?
Brenda Tushaus: So we have I had to look at it because you had you were guessing at the number. It’s we have like it was around one hundred and fifty teams. We do an analysis like every six months. And this is interesting. I’ll share with you just the analysis is how many teams, how many of our associates at our company are considered team members versus non team members and what percentage of our business comes from teams? How many times have we added in the last year versus the year before and the year before and the year before?
How many teams have it? So we track all that just because teams didn’t exist ten years ago. And so now so I’ve been keeping track of all this. So about one hundred and fifty or so teams. But then I look at like true teams and what I mean by true teams and I don’t know if there’s any science to this. I just say how many of those teams are three or more people just because we have so many husband and wife teams or father daughter or things like a two person team? So if I back the two person teams, then we’re closer to about seventy five that are three person or more teams.
Katie Ragusa: Wow. It’s a lot in ramyun. Right before your session, he ended with the fact that he thinks teams are the biggest threat to a brokerage and you’re thriving with a lot of teams. So what’s how does that work for you guys?
Brenda Tushaus: Well, you know, I mean, there’s some truth to what Rob has to say. I mean, hence why I know I I track the teams now. There are we’ve seen other brokerages that did not adopt a teams fast enough in our marketplace. We had to be very team friendly and offer team economics to allow to allow growth and to allow our people to build teams. That was one of the first questions from a gentleman I met in our new lacrosse market. They right away started asking about how does results handle teams, because I want to become the next, you know, whoever. And so but I’ll tell you, though, the teams we have a handful of like the mega teams, those are teams that are maybe 30 or more agents. They are running their own little brokerage within our brokerage. They all work with coaches that tell them how to squeeze every dime out of their broker. And, you know, and so, you know, that happens.
Katie Ragusa: How is it being the broker?
Brenda Tushaus: So much fun. But, you know, I also you know, these are they’re amazing people to these these teams that I work for. They’re great, great minds, business people that we were. But I’ll tell you, as far as I’m tracking the teams, we’ve our business from teams has been slightly declining. Our growth of teams has been declining. So it’s ever so slightly. So I don’t know if that’s a trend because for a while it was like, you got to build a team, you got to build a team, you got to build a team. And now suddenly the teams are kind of dying down. I don’t know if it’s because I mean, you could speculate all day long, but I’m sure you’re always hearing about lead sources that are drying up. A lot of these teams have a model where they’re buying and feeding leads to their team members for a hefty split. But these lead sources keep changing or drying up on them, and it’s making it more difficult for them to run that model. So I don’t know if that. But it’s we’re just seeing that kind of that pace is slowing down now.
Katie Ragusa: Interesting.
How do you called them like many companies. I mean, you’ve got these mega teams and you’ve got some smaller teams, too. But how do you keep them all brand compliant? I know. Coming up occasionally and in line with who Re/max results is not trying to go push the boundaries too much because you want them co-brand brand. Right.
Brenda Tushaus: Yeah, yeah, there was we had one team that comes to mind within the last couple of years that was not brand compliant that we had, we asked them to leave.
They had to leave because they were not only violating our rules, but violating Re/max franchise rules. So for the most part, we’ve got our own marketing team at Re/max results, a three amazing individuals that are at the disposal of our sales executives. And they a lot of our teams and their branding and their marketing that you see has been done by us.
Katie Ragusa: So we know that it’s compliant, you know, the safer way to let them give them some leeway if it’s done in-house, you know, your own marketing style is not going to push it too far because you do allow them to color personalization of their sites and they can add a second logo and things that a lot of that scares a lot of brokers of what could they do with it. So managing it in-house is a way that they could still control it, but give a little leeway.
Brenda Tushaus: Yeah. And, you know, we like to they are their own brand, too, so they are their own brand with the power of Re/max behind them. That’s kind of the way I see it.
Katie Ragusa: So did you recruit teams specifically or were the sales executives there? And the concept of team started and it just kind of happened.
Brenda Tushaus: You know, it’s a it’s a a mix I’m trying to think of.
Mix, we recruit we recruit teams as just as often just as many as non team as independent sales executives, but there’s a lot of people that we recruit that come to the company and just say, I’m coming to results because I want to build a team.
Katie Ragusa: So the recruiting then takes on two different forms, right? You’re recruiting the teams and the sales executives and then you have some of the teams doing their own recruiting of team members, right? Oh, yes.
So how does that work and how are those stats expectations, anything about it different than the sales executives that you recruit directly?
Brenda Tushaus: Oh, that’s a I’m glad you asked. That’s a fun one. So because, you know, we have our kind of our standards.
Katie Ragusa: OK, so one of the things maybe we’ll ask again at the happy hour later.
Brenda Tushaus: I’ll give you a totally different answer. No, I’m just kidding. I would say that we. We never used to hire newly licensed agents, for example, that changed years ago, and we just we didn’t have the model for it. It was just very, very, very different. But now we hire newly licensed sales executives. But it’s generally it’s the teams that are hiring them.
Our regional managers, our recruiters are not out there recruiting people fresh out of real estate school. It’s teams that want them or they’ve been responsible for bringing them up to standard somewhat. Yeah, they are. They are. So we’ve we have a new we call it results ready training program that’s geared specifically to the newly licensed sales executives that join our company and they’re required to take it. So as well. We’ve rewritten our independent contractor agreements for team members that addresses that minimum expectations of sales performance is again, sometimes it scares people. Sometimes people go, well, what if I don’t sell 10 homes and my first year in the business?
It’s a standard. It’s a benchmark. We don’t hold them to that. But things like that, we’ve had to do because of teams, we’ve had some teams that are really good at recruiting and growing amazing people and keep those high standards of productivity and then sometimes not so good at that.
Katie Ragusa: So it obviously has to pay off enough times for you to continue to allow new sales executive. That’s a big policy shift that you didn’t always embrace.
Yeah. So all right. So we’ve talked a lot about how you guys recruit, but you actually host a podcast where you interview your own top producers. So not only can everybody hear it from you, but they can hear it directly from your sales executives and maybe some teams, too, on that podcast. So can you tell us a little bit about where people can find you in that podcast?
Brenda Tushaus: It’s called the Results Driven Podcast. And I know you’re going to ask me to name all the different platforms. It’s pretty much everywhere and have all the podcast places.
It’s all the podcast places. We do have a website. It’s called Results Driven Podcast, where we send listeners to, if they want to, us to cover certain topics or feature certain sales executives. But if you go there, then you can find the link to the podcast. Perfect.
Katie Ragusa: So any final advice for brokers who might be sitting here struggling with recruiting any nuggets that you can leave them? Like if they had to pick one thing to do next, what should they do? Or something they should start making time for.
Brenda Tushaus: I know you stumped me on that one. I there’s so many things there, so I thought this book will be coming out later, you know, after 20, 20. I really, really could write a book. I think all of us could. So I would just say it, you know, invest in your sales executives, invest in them and don’t just don’t just make it talk. Just invest in them. And I mean, time, money, training. And it will you’ll be rewarded. It’s we we spend so much on our technology, our marketing, our facilities, our buildings are amazing. Our staff. We invest in our sales executives. Our sales executives are the customer, our customer.
And just take a look at what you’re doing and really ask yourself, you know what? Is this where is this is my company, a company that someone can come and grow and am I giving them all that I can? You just got to. You know, make them number one.
Katie Ragusa: We’re learning so many lessons today about just being authentic and committing to that. Whatever your story is or whatever you provide, just stick with it and continue to do so.
It’s not just about recruiting and getting them on board. So I’m going to thank you for all of your insights today and your time with us on. This was great. And you guys can find Re/max results, results in it. They’ve got a great join us page. If any of you guys are thinking about boosting your recruiting efforts, even online with capturing not just consumer leads, but potential sales executives and realtors, too. So thank you so much, Brenda.
Brenda Tushaus: Thank you.
Katie Ragusa: All right. Talk to you later.
