Lauren Duke: CoreOps Collective

REE #287 Transcript

[00:00:00] Lauren Duke:
We're not necessarily here long term doing anything. We are setting up the foundation, that true foundation for their business to be able to scale. So now they say, "Oh, my CRM is built out. I have these lead magnets, I have these landing pages. Everything connects. I can see my numbers automatically," because they've set up the automations to be able to do so.

[00:01:00]
Hey, welcome back to the Real Estate Excellence Podcast. Today's guest is a proven force behind one of the nation's most successful real estate teams—helping close to over 3,000 transactions, recruiting and training 150+ agents, and launching 21 expansion locations across the U.S. She now leads a company that specializes in replacing chaos with clarity, building custom systems and structure for agents ready to scale with confidence.

[00:01:23] Tracy Hayes:
If you're an agent tired of duct taping your business together and want to operate like a true CEO, this episode is for you. Please welcome the founder and CEO of Core Ops Collective, Lauren Duke.

Hello, hello. Thank you for joining. Good morning. I really appreciate you coming on and reaching out to me and telling me a little bit about your business, because I think, of all the agents that I've had on—this is episode 287, so I’ve probably had 270 agents on—they have challenges with breaking through the lid, as I call it. Trying to do everything [00:02:00] themselves and then trying to start to scale their business and create the systems that you help in, and you built this company around to help coach them and bring them to that next level.

[00:02:09] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of times, agents get to a point where, just like you said, they’re doing it all themselves. They’re trying to wear every single hat in their business, but at the end of the day, they don’t even know what systems are to begin with to know really even where to start.

[00:02:28] Tracy Hayes:
Where we come in. I'm gonna jump forward because this question's just been on the tip of my brain, you know, getting prepared for the show today. Because I always talk about the importance of what brokerage you go to and how many—so many of these brokerages—I think a lot of agents think the brokerage is going to do what you do for them. Which I’m sure there are some that do because they’re advanced and out in front. But the majority of them do not really get into the weeds of what you actually—your [00:03:00] services—provide.

[00:03:01] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, I would agree with that. I would agree with that. I think a lot of brokerages, you know, they offer the compliance software and they offer certain marketing things, but nothing is tailored to the agent. At the end of the day, regardless of the brokerage, they want business to—

[00:03:18] Tracy Hayes:
Stay with the brokerage, you know? Right. How do you differentiate yourself? I love CRMs. However, as a loan officer and soldier on the ground doing what I do as my day job—and a real estate agent doing what they do in their day job—they really don't have time to spend and really utilize their CRMs for all the things that they do. And they really do need the support of an operations staff behind them to really either put 'em directly on the path of, “Yes, this is how you do it: boom, boom, boom, A-B-C, move on.” Or it just never gets done.

[00:03:59] Lauren Duke:
[00:04:00] For the most part, it doesn’t get done. And that's just because there are 9,000 ways you can go with it, right? And someone will tell you, “Oh, you have to only use your CRM for a contact database, essentially.” And you have other people that are saying, “No, you have to build it out to an immense amount in order for it to be successful.” And really, it depends on—

[00:04:26] Tracy Hayes:
What you want for your business. Right. Right. I’ve spent so many times through these different trainings, actually, you know, with CRMs, and they basically just overwhelm you with a tidal wave. Because it can do so many different things. But you need to pick the two or three things that you want—and that question’s never asked.

But I’m gonna move on with that soapbox on CRMs.

Lauren, tell us a little bit of your background. You know, what was young Lauren looking to do—18, 19 years old—and then, you know, what led you to get into the real estate industry?

[00:04:59] Lauren Duke:
[00:05:00] So I actually was a hairdresser. I went to cosmetology school and then I got married very young. I was a military spouse, moved all over the world. And when I was living in Italy, I had my first son. We moved back to the States and I was like, "Ooh, I don't want to go back into a traditional, you know, 9 to 5, put my kid in daycare" sort of job. Because I had just—you weren’t allowed to work in Italy, so I was like illegally doing hair out of my house. It was a big—so I didn’t want to go—

You know, when we moved back to the States—we moved to Tennessee—I didn’t want to have to put my kid in daycare. He was nine months old. And I decided, “Okay, what can I do from home?”

Started a virtual assistant business and posted about it on Facebook. Had a friend connect me with a real estate agent that she formerly had worked for and was like, “Hey, she's looking for a transaction coordinator.”

[00:06:00] And I was like, "Cool. What’s that? I’ll figure it out." Right? Like, I have no idea what that is, but surely it couldn’t be too hard. And that was my famous best words, right?

I was sweating bullets emailing someone, because I was just so afraid I was gonna make a mistake. But ended up coming onto that real estate team full-time as TC, but also in an operations role as well. And had no idea that when I joined, the CEO had this big vision of opening up new team locations in—around these military bases. Okay?

And so we went from that one location with four agents and I think within eight months we had four or five locations with about 30 or 40 agents and—

[00:07:00] Lauren Duke:
It kind of just took off from there.

[00:07:01] Tracy Hayes:
We just kept growing, really focusing. I guess this broker was focused on the military community, correct?

[00:07:07] Lauren Duke:
Yes.

[00:07:08] Tracy Hayes:
Interesting. Okay. Alright, so what—you enter doing some transaction coordinating for them?

[00:08:00] Tracy Hayes:
And then obviously, as you know, the top teams that I know here locally around me, they eventually truly need an operations person. But here's an interesting thing that I learned. I was telling you a little bit about the young lady that I've had in that helps agents like you do—from a different angle than what you're specializing in. She's specializing on a different side.

But she approached the team lead, who was a very successful agent—unfortunately no longer with us, passed away a couple years ago or a year ago. Anyway, she said, “Well, what does an operations person do?” So she spent a year investigating—interviewing, calling on—she was with Keller Williams, so I assume she was calling other Keller Williams top teams that had operations managers and asking, “What does an operations manager do? Officer? Your COO?”

So tell us a little bit about how the migration into your full role there.

[00:08:10] Lauren Duke:
So we grew so quickly, and very early on I was like, “Hey, we have so many transactions going on—I can’t do this by myself.” So I ended up hiring another military spouse, another friend, and taught her how to TC while I kind of focused on the expansion portion—getting in with other market centers and finding recruits, finding team leads, building out the training programs, building out the onboarding.

You know, I wasn’t even worried about retention at this point because it was all very much like, “Oh, we have so many agents coming, we just need to figure out how to get them in.” So they kind of built itself up naturally as the team did. However, I was a—

[00:08:55] Tracy Hayes:
Hairdresser before this. Like you had no idea—no formal [00:09:00] training on how to do a lot of these things.

[00:09:01] Lauren Duke:
Yeah. No MBA sitting on my wall right now. Right? I very much learned by trial and error. And there were quite a few of those—let's put it that way. I made roughly—I joke like—we closed 3,000 transactions, and I also made 3,000 mistakes.

[00:09:21] Tracy Hayes:
So how do—because yeah, you're, what do they call it? Learning by fire or something like that. Basically failing forward. I'm sure you know that whole—

For those listening out there right now, and probably do have friends, or maybe there’s some real estate agents who may not be real estate agents much longer—'cause this is not working out for them—but may still want to be in the real estate industry and see this avenue…

You obviously had to pull some resources in. Were you with a large brokerage where there were other people to call on, and other franchises or whatever, or from a corporate standpoint to kinda learn some of these things that should [00:10:00] be going on in the backside? Or were you and the broker kind of hand-in-hand with this?

[00:10:04] Lauren Duke:
No. So we were with Keller Williams.

[00:10:06] Tracy Hayes:
Mm-hmm.

[00:10:06] Lauren Duke:
So we did have all of the KW resources available to us. And then I learned quickly on that having an operations coach was incredibly important—not just to help me self-discover, you know, my own potential within the role, but also kind of go through and help strategize, “Hey, am I even on the right path—”

[00:10:32] Tracy Hayes:
With this. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, going down a whole—you're trying to accomplish a particular thing, which I’m sure you can give us an example of—and then realize you just wasted a lot of time, energy, and I’m sure money going down this… when the coach kind of helped you and said, “You know, that’s not gonna work. I would recommend this or that.”

[00:10:53] Lauren Duke:
Well also, I’m stubborn at the same time. So one of the first conversations that I had with my coach—who I still coach with today, actually—but one of the very first conversations we had, she was like, “What is your team’s culture?” And, “Your culture can’t be ‘family.’”

And I was like, “No, no, no, no. That’s what ours is. Like, we are one big happy family,” you know? Like, “That’s how we operate.” And she was like, “That can’t work. You need to embody some core values in there as well. You need to be able to say, ‘No, this is what our mission is. This is what we’re aiming towards.’” Instead of just feeling like one big happy family.

And I was so determined to prove her wrong. I was like, “No, no, no, no. That’s what ours is.” And it was the day that someone was like, “Are you guys a real estate team or, you know, do you operate more like a sorority?” And I was like, “Oh man. She’s right. She’s right. Okay. Got it. Understood.”

[00:11:51] Tracy Hayes:
A sorority. It was a rough day, honestly. That’s funny. But it is true. I mean—I see it [00:12:00] around here. Obviously I’m on social media a lot because I put a lot of stuff out on social media for the show and so forth. And there are some groups that… that’s how they bond. That’s how they—now, are they operating together? No.

I think actually when they close their— they go home and get on their laptop or whatever and are putting in deals and structuring deals. They’re, you know, running their own operations department. But on the face of it, it looks like a big sorority and everyone’s having fun.

But then it comes down to a point—’cause I think when you started to mention that, it made me think—that this person was getting to a point, “Well, you’ve gotta have some structure. It just can’t be the family. You know, we appear to be a family bond.” There has to be something bonding it stronger than that—as far as non-family people acting as family, I should say.

[00:12:51] Lauren Duke:
Well, it’s just having like standards and expectations too. And even a culture of accountability or a culture of lead generation. You know, we can’t just always [00:13:00] rely on the head of the family, so to speak, to kind of feed the rest of us. We have to all participate. And, you know, we can’t just operate as if we’re waiting on someone else to step in and do it—

[00:13:16] Tracy Hayes:
—for us. So that leads—so when you get up to working here with 21 locations, you know, obviously you’re probably—I would imagine—60 to 80 agents or something of that nature. You can tell us the details there, but what did you build it to? What did your operations side look like as far as you and any other transaction coordinators, marketing people—what did it look like when you had it all built out?

[00:13:43] Lauren Duke:
I think the most amount of admin staff we had at one time was around 22, 25.

[00:13:51] Tracy Hayes:
Wow. Admin. You had a lot.

[00:13:54] Lauren Duke:
Yeah.

[00:13:55] Tracy Hayes:
How many agents at that point?

[00:13:57] Lauren Duke:
We probably had about a hundred.

[00:14:00] Tracy Hayes:
Okay. So basically one for every five agents, roughly.

[00:14:04] Lauren Duke:
We had too many admin because of the fact that our operations were not efficient. We didn’t have accountability standards. We didn’t have, you know, “Hey, in your role, you're going to be focusing on this, this, this, and this.”
And there was always the gray. And that was one of the biggest mistakes that we made.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t kind of create that culture together, and I no longer saw eye to eye with the CEO, so we ended up parting ways.
And that was the whole basis of how Core Ops came to be—because there are so many real estate agents and businesses out there that are just winging it and flying by the seat of their pants.
And they have this potential, but they can’t figure out how to slow down long enough [00:15:00] to say, “No, this is really what I want. This is who my target audience is. This is what my messaging is going to look like. This is how we're going to convert clients after they come in.”

They don’t slow down long enough to put those pieces in place.
And so I created a framework called SCALE that we use in our Strategy to Scale program, that walks them through that—essentially where we're slowing them down just long enough, right?—to be able to pull out: What is it that you want?
What do you want your culture— even if it's just you—what do you want people to know you as?

[00:15:39] Tracy Hayes:
This is really good stuff right here. 'Cause you are hitting probably on 90-something percent of what's out there.
There’s people that don’t have teams, that—I mean, don’t have operation staff—and are probably better than some of the people that do have an operation staff because they are lost.
And it’s not whether you’re small. Just ‘cause you’re small…

There’s the biggest [00:16:00] corporations out there—and I’ve been with a few of 'em—that are total clusters, and they're not getting there. They don’t have a message.
And this is my belief: there are a bunch of people from all different places, and they’re not on the same page.
They’re all just coming in day to day, and there's a lot of gray area. And because the lights are still on at five o’clock, they’re good.
And they feel like they’ve accomplished something, when really they are not moving forward in the ultimate goal—which is to create the systems and the operations that just… no matter what you put in, it’s gonna grind it up and put out a beautiful display at the other end—or great service provided.

[00:16:45] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, with that, a lot of agents have no idea where to start—because they don't even know what the definition of a system is.

My second grader actually came home from school last [00:17:00] week, and you would've thought that… I don't know, he won the science fair or something. But he came home and he handed me his homework, and I read it, and I was so excited because it was:
"Let's talk about a system that you have at home that you use for organization."
And I was like, "Oh my gosh, finally!" Like, I never thought that I would be able to help my kid with his second-grade homework with what I do every day.

But we have all of these—like look at my office behind me, right? We’ve got all these nice built-ins, and all of these cute bins and organizational things, right?

My son decided that he wanted to talk about our like $30 Amazon-bought—I don’t even think it’s made out of real metal—shoe organization rack.
And it clicked for me. I was like, oh, but that’s the perfect system.
Because he knows that if he doesn’t put his shoes away, we will all trip over them.
And if he doesn’t put them away, he can lose them.
And we’ll be late for school.
And then Mom is mad.
[00:18:00] And all of those things.

It’s the same thing in your business.
What do you do every single day to keep you from literally tripping over yourself when—

[00:18:10] Tracy Hayes:
When you're bringing on—or you're talking to—I guess you're just explaining to people what you do.
Like you said, these agents—they’ve heard it because they’ve been to so many trainings and so forth: “Oh, you need to have a system. You need to have a system.”

But, you know, they’re told a lot of things, obviously—how to do their… they need to have social media, they need to be doing this, they need to be doing that.
And they definitely can get lost, which I imagine probably costs a lot of them their business, because they're doing the wrong things.
They don’t have a system in place that ensures they’re spending their time doing money-making activities.

You know, in their schedule—they fill it up with too much of stuff that doesn’t make them money, those types of things.

But when you're sitting down, tell us how you get that first—that client that’s interested in your business. Or maybe you're standing in front of a group of agents just explaining what you do to—obviously, hopefully [00:19:00] some of them might be interested in your service.
How do you describe it?

[00:19:05] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, so we replace survival mode with structure.
And we do that through our Strategy to Scale program.

We walk you through our signature SCALE framework, which is:

• S – Set the vision
  You don’t know where you want to go, and you don’t know where you can go, unless you know where you’re at right now and where you want to go.
  So we’re going through and we’re saying:
  “Hey, what is all of this for? What does it look like right now? Where do you want to be in 3 years, 5 years—financial-wise?”
  All of those things. So we’re setting the vision. We’re doing an alignment audit there.
• Then we go into C – Capture Attention
  What does your messaging look like? What are your core values?
  So if someone else is interested in coming into your business, you know what you’re looking for in another person that comes in, right?

But also—what are your lead magnets?
We’re going to go through and pick 2 to 3 lead gen channels that are the most revenue-generating for you.
We’re going to help you create the lead magnets, the landing pages, and the workflows for that.

• And then we’re going into A – Acquire Business
  That’s where we’re building out the CRM for you.
  We’re saying, “Hey, lead comes in through Facebook group, right? They’re downloading this lead magnet—what happens after that?”
  How are we segmenting them?
  How are we nurturing them in that brand voice that we just created in Capture Attention?

And then also going through our Consults That Convert toolkit—
So what are you putting in your listing presentation that makes someone be like, “Oh, I know Lauren and I want her to list my house”?

[00:21:00] Lauren Duke:
Then we're going into L, which is Lead with Systems.
So how does this all come together to show you, “Okay, we got 10 new leads, we went on eight appointments, and we got four clients.”
So we know that next month, we need to double that if we want to hit that financial goal we set in the beginning.

And then E is Elevate Experience.
If you don't have the systems set up in the first place, you can't elevate the client experience—because that's where you get burnt out.
And not every client gets the same consistent experience.

So we go through it in that order on purpose. But essentially, that’s my very long elevator pitch program to kind of just clean up all of your—

[00:21:40] Tracy Hayes:
—chaos.
Well, I'm big on: Facts tell, stories sell. So I think you gave us some factual data there—what you do.

Can you—I'm sure you've had a client, probably multiple ones—but there's always one you probably think of when you're kind of describing, trying to relate to someone what you do.
Go through what a client’s situation is that you've had—where they were at.

I’m sure that’s your initial discussion, right? “Where are you at right now?” Let's get that down.
And then, by the time you finished this process, what were the biggest changes?

Which I think for anyone… you know, what is their biggest change in their day-to-day? Start time-blocking, or—I assume you picked up some tasks for them to relieve them, so they can be doing more important tasks they need to be doing.

So can you kind of tell us about one of your—I guess—success stories?

[00:22:31] Lauren Duke:
Yeah. So, a lot of our agents come to us and they are in the—you know, all of our agents, I should say—come to us and they are in the messy middle.
They are successful. They’re productive.
They're hitting their number goals. They have the take-home that they want each month.
But they can’t seem to get past a certain point because there’s just not enough hours in the day to do everything.

And so they know that they need those “systems,” quote-unquote, right?

We go through—we’re putting them in place for them. We’re not necessarily here long-term doing anything.
We are setting up the foundation, that true foundation for their business to be able to scale.

So now they say:
“Oh, my CRM is built out. I have these lead magnets. I have these landing pages. Everything connects. I can see my numbers automatically,”
because they’ve set up the automations to be able to do so.

So… we don’t do anything long-term unless you were to get into one-on-one coaching, and we train your future admin and things like that.

But a lot of people come to us and they're saying:
“Hey, I want to hire an admin,” or,
“I’ve brought a VA on, but I have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing.”

[00:23:51] Lauren Duke (cont.):
So we are the strategists helping you build out what they’re supposed to be doing.

[00:23:54] Tracy Hayes:
Let’s really—I want you to dig in a little bit for us on—because I think the listeners are… obviously, my primary audience is real estate agents listening here. So your audience as well as mine.

Because they’re obviously going to see that you’ve been on the show and hopefully they’ll tune in and hear and learn something.

Because you were kind of general there a little bit about, you know, most of your agents—this is where they’re at when you meet them.

Let’s describe that a little bit more, because I really want it to resonate with those that are out there listening.
'Cause if you’re not saying—if they’re just listening to the brief 30,000-foot overview you just gave, and they’re an agent, they might go:
“Well, I don’t think that’s me.”

I think we need to probably dig a little bit deeper.
Because like I said, a majority of agents—if they’re doing business and they’ve been in this business 2 or 3 years…

And I think the one thing I always describe—what you were describing—but the one thing I always add to it is:
They realize they’re not growing.
They have good business, but they’re seeing these other agents, you know…

And then to me, in our area here in Northeast Florida—somewhere between $7–10 million in gross volume—they’re tapped out.

Where, in our area—Duval and St. John’s County here in Jacksonville and St. Augustine—the average price point is about $400,000, give or take.

So you can do the math on how many transactions that is.

They’re tapping out.
In other words, if they’re trying to do everything themselves—transaction coordinate, do their own marketing, working their CRM, all the services that you can fill in here that I didn’t just mention…

But really describe for us the agent that’s coming to you—that’s hit this lid, and has gone maybe a year or two without any real growth.

[00:25:55] Lauren Duke:
Just like you said—between $5 and $7 million, roughly 2 to 3 units per month.
They’ve really hit that lid, and they’re realizing that not every client gets the same experience.

They don’t have a past-client touch plan.
You know, someone closes and they're like, “Oh, I want to send them a home anniversary gift next year…” and then they forget for three years in a row.

Now they want to do community events or client appreciation events—but how do you find the time to even start implementing that?

Or, you know, they’re saying happy birthday on Facebook, but they’d really love to add in that handwritten note card or whatever—but they just don’t have the touch plan put together to tell them what to do.

A lead comes in and they might remember to call them—or they’re hoping that the general CRM auto-plan that’s set up is good enough.

It’s not.
Because they’re not getting [00:27:00] any nurtures.
They’re not getting any business being acquired from it.

But they’re someone who goes to bed at night and they’re like:
“Man, I feel like I didn’t check anything off of my to-do list.”

And they are just constantly in the grind of:
“Let’s get this one closed and move on to the next one,”
without being able to work actually on—

[00:27:25] Tracy Hayes:
The business. Yeah, the touchpoint. I mean, I could say—there's leads coming in, they call them once, maybe they don’t answer, maybe they send them a text… then they get busy. And all of a sudden, two or three days go by and they’re like, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t try to get that—”
You know, stay on top of that lead to try to convert it.

This is all money being left on the table because there’s no real system in place to make sure stuff’s not falling through the cracks.

[00:27:51] Lauren Duke:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

[00:27:54] Tracy Hayes:
Yeah. I think every agent out there right now—and there’s a bunch of different services—you’re setting these [00:28:00] systems up for them, which I think…

I mean, I don’t know. Do you have a beginner agent? I mean, should agents really—if the ideal situation for you would be an agent who just gets started, they’re getting their first few deals—
Should they kind of maybe be tuning into some of your training?

And is that the ideal situation versus, you know, obviously you're helping a lot that have realized they don’t have systems in place, but they may have gone years and really could be much further along in their real estate careers—as far as production’s concerned—if they actually had these things built in sooner?

[00:28:35] Lauren Duke:
We absolutely do have some training that is geared toward more of the newer agent—especially like our monthly webinars and some of the free things like that.

And this is something we’ve gone back and forth on, because of course we want you to be successful from the get-go. But it’s also so incredibly hard to know:

• what you like to do,
• who your ideal audience is,
• what kind of client you actually want to serve—

Unless you’ve seen a bunch of different kinds, right?

If you are five, seven years into this and you did buyers for the first three years and now all of a sudden it’s turning into listings, then you're like, “I actually love listings. I don’t want to work with buyers at all.”
Okay, great—let’s run with that then.

Whereas in the beginning, you’re so desperate, so to speak, to have any kind of deal that you're like,
“Oh, you want to buy a home? I don't care where it is. Yeah, I’ll drive three hours, sure! Great—let’s do it,” right?

So it's hard to put all of that into place for the brand-new agent because you really don't have a good idea of who it is you want to work with.
So unfortunately, you do kind of have to go—

[00:29:54] Tracy Hayes:
—through that trial and error there.

And anyone listening—coreopscollective.com is Lauren’s website.
That’s core—C-O-R-E—opscollective.com.
You can go on there and obviously it does give you an overview.

And I just want—let’s go down through—it’s on the Services page, just so everyone understands.

One of the first things you listed here—and I saw there was a photo or a demonstration—this Business Hub that you have.

[00:30:20] Tracy Hayes (cont.):
Tell us about the Business Hub and how someone—
I think everyone in corporate America, there's some place they can go in their corporate website, I imagine, to get answers.
I imagine this is that place?

[00:30:40] Lauren Duke:
Yep. Yeah—very similar, yes.

So our Business Hub is a Google Sheet that we have created to track everything about the transaction—your pipeline.
It has a lot of formulas and automations in it. However, I did try to make it where even the most intimidated Google Sheets person can’t break it, I promise.
You can just press “Undo.” It’ll all be okay.

But you know, you can track everything about the transaction.
So you’re tracking:

• your lead source,
• your client’s information—

And that’s being transposed automatically into a buyer checklist, a listing checklist for when things go under contract.
So you can follow along and really create that touch plan.

Once it closes, they go over to the past client list.
And again, you can build out what that touch plan looks like—for you to just check the little checkboxes and make it easy to follow along with what you want to be doing for your—

[00:31:40] Tracy Hayes:
—clients.
CRM buildout—I imagine you have clients who are in different brokerages.
They’re using different CRMs.

I mean—I don’t know. In our world, in lending, most of the several companies I’ve worked for… Total Expert is the one we like to use.

But I imagine a lot of them do similar things. Maybe some have some new bells and whistles.

Do you work within whatever CRM they have, assuming they’re utilizing one?
Or do you suggest that they start their own CRM?

[00:32:14] Lauren Duke:
It depends.
If they’re like, “Hey, I don’t really know if this is the brokerage for me,” then we’re going to talk through:

• Should you be using the kvCORE that’s provided?
• Or should you be using whatever one, right?
• Or would it be better to build out on one that is a little more user-friendly?

So we walk through different scenarios.
We do build out on whichever one it is that you choose.
And, you know, that comes sometimes with a learning curve to us, right?

[00:32:49] Tracy Hayes:
Because it may be the first time that you’re building it out.

So—I went off on a little tangent on CRMs at the beginning of our show here today.
What do you find, as far as a lot of these agents we described earlier—the majority of your customers—where they’re at in their real estate careers, being overwhelmed…

Are a lot of them even using their CRM?
I bet… I would just bet that most of them are not really doing much of anything in their CRM when they come to you.

[00:33:23] Lauren Duke:
The typical agent that comes to us—they usually have:

• one that is provided to them,
• one that is through the website that they purchased,
• and maybe one through a marketing company they signed up with a while ago.

[00:33:37] Tracy Hayes:
So they usually have a variety?

[00:33:39] Lauren Duke:
Multiple.

[00:33:41] Tracy Hayes:
Oh my goodness.

[00:33:42] Lauren Duke:
Okay. And they’re not using any of them.
Or they’re like,
“Oh no, I put everybody into my Notes app on my phone…”

Which—listen, I’m not here to dog your system, okay?
If that’s the one that works for you—we’ll figure out how to make it work for you, okay?

But if there’s another [00:34:00] way that we could get integrated with one that is a lot easier for other people to come into your business and use, then we’re gonna help you—

[00:34:09] Tracy Hayes:
—figure that out.

What do you—when you’re in the CRM—what is your mindset as a company, as Core Ops?
What kind of things need to be put on auto for these agents who are out there?

[00:34:59] Tracy Hayes:
Because they—they really don’t have time themselves. You know, obviously here, the company I work for, we’ve got a marketing department. So they’ve got stuff we can go in there and click and—boom—it’s on my Facebook, it’s on my LinkedIn, whatever. I can copy and paste if I wanted to.
Or it just automatically goes over.

What are some of the things—or—and then emails are going out. I think they do it weekly or something. We’re sending out basically a weekly email.
What are some of the real basic things that you need to put that CRM on auto-drive with?

[00:35:00] Lauren Duke:
Something for new leads.

So—someone signs up on your landing page to download your buyer guide, right?
We need to have that information going into the CRM—

[00:35:13] Tracy Hayes:
Automatically. Not you manually putting it in—this is automatically going in.

[00:35:17] Lauren Duke:
Yep—automatically.
Nurturing those new leads. Saying things like:

• “Hey, are you looking to buy or sell?”
• “Do you want to know what your home value is?”
• “I saw this property and blah blah blah…”

Right? Like, whatever audience you’re talking to.

And that’s the biggest thing that sets us apart from other companies.
There are companies that you can go to and download their drip campaigns, and get them automatically uploaded into your Follow Up Boss or whatever.
Those companies are great.
But—they don’t customize the messaging.

And so…
You sound like all the other agents in your market, right?
And who they’re talking to isn’t going to be who you are talking to.
They’re not going to convert the audience that is supposed to be for you.

So that’s the biggest thing—and that’s why we very much build out what the foundation is.
Because if you don’t know who you’re talking to, and you just download another template, or you just download another set of emails that are “proven to work”—
Are they going to work for your exact—

[00:36:25] Tracy Hayes:
Audience. Right. No—I agree. I agree with you.

I think anyone listening right now—I’ve been guilty of this too—there’s so much stuff out there coming at us.
And it’s like, “Oh, just click here and it’ll do this for you.” And you do it, but you’re not actually process-focused.

In other words, you’re not following it all the way through.
You know:

• What if a client entered here?
• And they got on your landing page or website, whatever it is—
• What’s going to happen if they click this and click that?
• You get the information—then what?

Then they send the email—but what’s the [00:37:00] email actually look like?
Have you actually walked through it?
Have you acted like you were the customer and actually seen what they were getting?

I guarantee you there’s a lot of automation in, and I guarantee you there’s a lot of stuff falling through the cracks—
Because they haven’t actually viewed the system, critiqued it, and tweaked it to work the way they want it to work.

[00:37:23] Lauren Duke:
Let’s talk about past client—

[00:37:24] Tracy Hayes:
Touch plans for a second. Mm-hmm, yeah. Because what you just said is perfect, where—

[00:37:29] Lauren Duke:
You know, someone closes, right?
And then what’s the first thing you want to happen after a closing?

You want to:

• Congratulate them,
• Thank them,
• And ask them for a review—
  You know, to help build up your own business.

What happens if we ask them once and they don’t give a review?

Are you asking them again?
Are you asking them again?

And what happens if they do give a review?
We even need to segment out what the past client touch plans look like.

Because if they do give a review, then we’re not going to send those other two follow-up emails asking again.
But if they don’t give a review, we are going to send those other two emails.

[00:38:08] Tracy Hayes:
Right. No—I actually think the past client is the gold.
It’s one thing I say on the show all the time:

That customer that’s in front of you at that moment in time—the one you’re working with that day—is the most important thing you could be doing.
Because they—if you do it right—could be a walking billboard for you.

So you need to finish painting that billboard and give them great service.
And then obviously nurture them post-close for the referrals—
Which is the greatest lead that you could get.

[00:38:36] Lauren Duke:
Yeah.
And if you don’t know what that past client touch plan needs to look like—
That’s why we’re here—to help strategize through all of that based off what you want your business to look like.

[00:38:48] Tracy Hayes:
Right. Yeah.

If you're community-oriented, then we're probably going to do some community events in there.

And I can imagine, obviously, some of this stuff you can more critique to the region you're in—whatever it is, obviously, the information that’s going out.

But do you have—I'm asking the agents out there to think about for a minute:

• Have you actually played the role of your past client and seen what they're getting?
• And then—what's your percentage of past clients who are actually completing a Rate My Agent or Google Review or something like that?

Are you following up on them until they do?
Are you giving them some incentive to do it?

Whatever it is—I’m sure Lauren here can help you out with that.

[00:39:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.):
Landing pages—this is really interesting.
And when we finish up, I want you to stay on, because I want to tell you about something I want to share with you.

But—landing pages. I just think they’re not being done because people don’t know how to do them.

Now—if you go on ChatGPT—it will walk you through and you can set up a real basic landing page.

It will take you several hours, where someone who’s done it enough times could take a few minutes, and then add the extra thrills to it that you don’t have—because they’ve just been doing it a while and have practiced a little bit.

[00:40:00] Tracy Hayes:
But to hire someone to do that—tell us about that service that you offer there. Who’s using it and what are they using it for?

[00:40:07] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, so we will go through and set up however—whatever the system looks like—for you to acquire a lead.
So for example, if you’re having an open house and you know that you won’t build out a new landing page for each open house—okay or change the graphics or whatever, cool, great, that’s totally fine.

Let’s set up a Google Form that’s just super easy.
You pull it up on your iPad—when someone checks in, they fill out the Google Form.
That can be a landing page.

Or we build one out that is connected to your website, and so it says, you know, coreopscollective.com/whatever, right?

Or it can be something through your email marketing program like Flodesk, Mailchimp, or ActiveCampaign—whatever one you use—and we set up a landing [00:41:00] page in there.

Whatever it is—it just needs to have that automation connected that is sending them the guide or download or whatever—

[00:41:10] Tracy Hayes:
—that they are requesting.

Can you share a little bit with the audience—maybe someone who’s really utilizing this service with you?
What are they using it for, and what kind of success are they seeing?

[00:41:24] Lauren Duke:
We have clients who have built out Facebook groups for, you know, “Moving to [Their Area].”
And whenever someone registers—or tries to get into the group—it’s like:
“Hey, do you want to download my Relocation to the Area Guide?”
Or:
“Do you want to download my Neighborhood Events Guide? I update it monthly so you know what’s happening for the kids in the area,” you know?

[00:41:53] Tracy Hayes:
That’s a—I like that one.

[00:41:55] Lauren Duke:
Yep.
They’ll just pop in their email—

[00:41:58] Tracy Hayes:
—and get the [00:42:00] guide.

So they come upon this page—because I know there are some top people around my area here. They have “Moving to St. Augustine”-type Facebook pages.
They’re going on there, and as they’re putting in their information to be accepted into the group—right—they’re filling out this information which then can be taken over to your landing page.

[00:42:26] Lauren Duke:
Yep, yeah.

We even have a client that has a podcast. And she just talks about the things going on in the area.
She’ll do little real estate market facts here and there, but primarily she’s talking about events, how the area’s growing, and things like that.

And she will reference—just like I’m about to do—her landing pages in her podcast.
So if she were to say, “Just go to coreopscollective.com/freebies and you can grab our Real Estate Readiness Guide or Real Estate Team Readiness Guide…”
Now people are going to go there and grab it.
Or—she puts it—

[00:43:05] Tracy Hayes:
—in the show notes.

Are you seeing them doing it for—oh, they’re doing it for particular neighborhoods?

[00:43:11] Lauren Duke:
We do have one out of Baton Rouge, and we’ve built out guides for different, particular areas of Baton Rouge that she updates frequently.

[00:43:25] Tracy Hayes:
Yeah, absolutely.

It really is—it’s just a really simple one-page, you know—it’s truly a landing page.

Now one thing I learned—I had a gentleman on, actually someone I went to high school with, for those listeners who remember Jim, just last week—it was two episodes ago.
He has realestatetomato.com. He’s been building websites for agents for over 20 years.

And one of the other things—for those who don’t have landing pages—and you agree or disagree with me on this, this is what I believe:
With AI—these AI search tools coming around…

And obviously those of you who’ve been on—I’ve had Lyman Starr who has an AI home search that he’s trying to get out to agents…

Just the natural language search side of AI—when you're typing into ChatGPT or something else, “I want to move to Northeast Florida,” or “I’m looking for a home in World Golf Village,” you’re mentioning things in sentences, right?

'Cause typically you’re writing in something like sentence form—maybe a bit like text messages.
But the key thing here is:

Blogging is back in style.

[00:45:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.):
And I have a landing page—topjacksonvilleagents.com—and there’s actually three other landing pages attached to that.

But blogging is back because AI is getting a lot of its answers from people who are blogging about the subject someone is searching for.
And a great way to build a landing page is also to have a blog connected to it.

You build a landing page, and then you regularly go in and add blogs.
It’s not that difficult.
And I’m sure there are people who love writing blogs and spending the time putting in all the details.
But you can compile a bunch of information and ask AI to help you write the blog—and it’s very simple.

And now you have content there that someone might be led to via AI search because your blog talks about something they’re searching for—
And they end up landing on your page.

[00:45:47] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And it’s become very, very, very important.

[00:45:55] Tracy Hayes:
All right, so—we were going down through the services here.

KPI dashboards, financial tracking—
Oh man.
I imagine for most agents this is like new.

Tell us what you’re doing there and how it helps them.

[00:45:51] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, so the KPI dashboards—we call it our CEO Dashboard—and it really is saying:

• This is how many you have under contract,
• This is how many you’ve closed—year to date, all time, etc.
• This is your biggest lead source.
• This is your net income year to date.
• This is your gross income year to date.

So, the financial tracking piece of it definitely goes in there.

However, we’ve separated that as well to really break down—you know, we want to get crystal clear on:

“If I have a listing, I can expect it to cost me X amount in order for it to close,”
so that you know your cost of sale, and you know what your take-home is going to be.

Versus, “Okay, I have a $150,000 listing and I provide a cleaning and photos and this and that, and I’m going to discount my commission… and now I’ve made $40.”
Right?

Versus, “I have a $600,000 listing and they don’t need a cleaning because they have regular cleaners,” and—
Just things like that.
You know exactly what you're going to walk away with.

[00:47:02] Tracy Hayes:
There’s no guessing.
Well—even before you go out on the appointment, you know, you already know some of the things you may have to do by plugging it in there and going in with this kind of spreadsheet in your mind.

Like:

• “I normally spend this much on photos.”
• “I usually cover this much for cleaning.”

Maybe you don’t track that, but I imagine—a lot of agents, when they get to this point and you’re training them and building these things out for them—are just wowed by this.

[00:47:33] Lauren Duke:
It’s honestly one of the biggest parts of our service, and it takes the least amount of time for us.

Because—we’re not going to go through and do your expense reports and get it all together.
That’s more of just an educational process.

[00:47:51] Tracy Hayes:
Well, you’re providing the tool, right?

[00:47:53] Lauren Duke:
Yes, correct.
We’re providing the tool they need to plug in the info.

But we’re going through and saying:
“Hey, based off of what your gross commission was last year, here’s what we recommend.”

These are based off a mix of:

• Millionaire Real Estate Agent model,
• Profit First,
• and real-life trial and error from our team.

This is where your:

• Subscriptions should be X%,
• Marketing should be X%…

And if you’re not paying yourself payroll, or you don’t have an admin staff, it doesn’t mean you can just go and double your marketing budget—
Without knowing whether or not it’s going to be worth it.

I wanted to say this before:
All agents right now are looking for the silver bullet.
The fastest way to get more closings—even if that means their cost of sale has doubled because they’re doing a pay-per-close lead service.

And those can work for a period of time, if they need to.
But it’s not sustainable over time—because [00:49:00] you still have to pay for other things as well.

And if your cost of sale is outrageous—

[00:49:12] Tracy Hayes:
Right. The other bills add up.

[00:49:13] Lauren Duke:
Exactly.
So, yeah—we go through and help them figure out what their budget is.

[00:49:14] Tracy Hayes:
Yeah, and catch up.

Just make sure you move over a little bit. I think you’re drifting out of frame—just so you stay centered.
We cut reels out of this and you were starting to fade off to one side there.

This part here—and if I—
I actually started listening to one of your podcasts. I didn’t get very far 'cause I didn’t realize you listed it on your page until this morning. But I started listening to it.

One of the things you do is coach or advise—or maybe you have a better term for it—for agents who have a vision of a team, and the structures and roles that come with that. Am I right?

[00:50:00] Lauren Duke:
Yep, yep.

[00:50:01] Tracy Hayes:
Tell us a little bit about how you attack that.

And the reason behind this question—for the listeners out there—
There’s some here… I’ve seen it, and I love you all.

But because I’ve interviewed so many top agents—and then I see others coming on and I see what they’re doing and where they’re at in their careers—and there are so many different ways to do the business.

Whether—

• One broker says “Hire an assistant first.”
• Another says “Get a transaction coordinator.”
• Others are teaming up with new agents, training them, and having them do open houses or run buyers…

There are so many different ways to run the business.

How do you tackle roles and responsibilities, as you have listed here—and the hiring part—for those who visualize a team of some description?

[00:50:54] Lauren Duke:
We will take you through the SCALE framework, and then we also—we have a second framework that we're working on right now to become even bigger and better.

But it's essentially the team aspect of it.
You can't grow your business—even just solo—without having that strong foundation in place.

So a lot of agents, they go and say,
“Hey, I want to bring on a buyer's agent,” or “a showing agent,” or things like that.
But if you don’t know how you're going to show up for your clients, how can you expect other people to show up for them?

That was one of the biggest lessons I learned from running the real estate team I did previously:
If you don't have standards and expectations for yourself, how are you going to have them for agents?

It’s the same thing as—like, I expect my kids to make their beds in the morning.
But how can they come into my room and see that mine’s not made?
That's not cool. Right?

But we go through:

• What do we want the culture to feel like?
• What are we going to provide them in terms of training?
• What are the standards and expectations we’re going to hold them to for lead generation?
• Are we going to be paying for leads for them to close, or do we expect them to use the education and resources we're providing?
• Are we going to have a specific admin just for the team, or is the admin going to be shared?

There are so many scenarios we go through—and none of them can be answered unless you know what you want to do with the—

[00:52:33] Tracy Hayes:
—with the team.

What are some things that—I mean, you don't want to tell someone they can't do something.
I imagine you try to avoid that because you don’t know—they feel that's the way they want to do it.

But I'm sure there are some things you probably don’t highly recommend.

Some things where people have this vision, but no knowledge.
They see other teams—Keller Williams has a lot of teams—and the other brokerages, they have team structures.

Some people have created a team and are doing really well, but they don’t know the inner workings of what makes that team successful.
They see it on the surface, but when they come to you, I’d imagine you realize right away:

“They have no idea what is making that clock tick.”

They just see the photo shoots, and obviously the team is producing—hopefully they're looking at those numbers going,
“Wow, that team's doing really well. I want to have a team like that.”

How do you dissect that?

[00:53:40] Lauren Duke:
That is such a loaded question to answer.

Because on one hand—no, I don’t want to tell someone they can’t do it a certain way.
But… history does have a way of repeating itself if you don’t learn from other people’s mistakes.

So, when I was bringing agents onto my previous team—essentially, if you had a pulse, you could join.
And that led to a really fun, you know, sorority…

But the production wasn’t there for everyone.
There were some agents selling 8, 10, 12 homes a month.
There were some that didn’t sell one in a year.

And so—you can imagine the resentment that created.

Like:

• “She’s doing all the work.”
• “She’s not doing anything.”
• “They’re both getting the same benefits by being on this team.”

Unless you have a really clear understanding of:

• what your core values are,
• the culture you want to create on the team,
• and what the standards and expectations are—

You should not have a team.

Now—it’s different if you’re just bringing in an admin, okay?
Bringing in one other person.
Or you want to create a micro team surrounding you.

That’s a little different—because the standard and expectation is:

“If you do this role that we are creating for you, then you get to stay. You get your paycheck.”

But it’s different for agents and assistants and things—

[00:55:32] Tracy Hayes:
—because you and I have been in the business a period of time to see a lot of these things.

Some of these agents come in—and even the ones that have been here one or two years—they still don’t have a full 30,000-foot view of what’s actually going on.

Would you agree with that?

I mean, a lot of them—everyone has this vision of a team, but when you sit back and go,
“Hold on a second…”

Do I really want this?

And like you just said:
I have an agent who’s doing really well, selling multiple homes per month.
Then I’ve got another agent doing one every other month—or a couple per year.

Am I going to put the energy into that?

Because I think everyone thinks big is better.
But the best teams I see around—lack of better words—are picky about who they bring in.

[00:56:29] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, absolutely.
And you can’t be picky about who you bring in if you don’t know what you stand for.
You don’t know what you want.

[00:56:36] Tracy Hayes:
Right. Right.

[00:56:39] Lauren Duke:
Because at that point, it’s like:
“Oh, you have a real estate license and you’ll look good in our photo shoot—come on!”

[00:56:46] Tracy Hayes:
That’s not… some of them—I believe actually have that criteria.

So you mentioned hiring as a resource.

What are you doing for—because I imagine you are working with some teams—and from that standpoint…
And the importance of having…

Kind of bleeding off what we were just talking about:
They’re hiring, but they don’t know how to interview the person.

You’ve only been in the business a few years and you think you’re busy, but now you want to bring people on…
And you don’t even really realize what you just did in the last two or three years to be able to truly interview someone to see if they—

[00:57:37] Tracy Hayes:
…actually are going to be someone who’s going to be a positive attribute to your team.

Where do you come in from a hiring standpoint?
Are you helping them in the sense of recruiting agents?
Are you helping them more in the operational staff?

[00:57:42] Lauren Duke:
We don’t help with recruiting agents in the sense of going out and finding them.

We do help with:

• Creating job descriptions,
• Creating their first 90-day plan of what they need to accomplish in order to stay on the team,
• Figuring out what interview questions need to be asked based on what your culture is going to be.

But we don’t go out and set appointments or find the people—because that needs to be a you thing.

[00:58:18] Tracy Hayes:
Mm-hmm.
You’ve mentioned culture a couple of times.

Describe to us what—you know, I would imagine you have to bring this out of a lot of your newer clients.
There’s a surface level of what they think they want… but then what are some of the deeper questions you’re asking to really draw out this culture?

Because I assume a lot of them don’t really know what they want yet—they’re just looking at the surface and don’t even realize there’s more below the surface that you’re helping bring out.

[00:58:50] Lauren Duke:
So in our Capture Attention portion of our framework, we go through a Core Values Map.
And that is interactive—we’re sitting together, and I’m giving you a list of… not really 1,000, but it feels like 101 different words.

And we’re taking more than 10 seconds to just look at each word and say:
“Hey, does this resonate with you at all?”

Because when you know what your core values are—when you know what you stand for—decisions become incredibly easy.

And when you have no idea what path you want to be on, the question of:

“Should I start a team or not?”
is one that will float around in your head forever.

Because when you understand what you value in life and what you want to wake up and get excited about every single day,
those hard decisions become incredibly clear.

So we go through this core values mapping to narrow down to a set of 3 to 5 words that you encompass—not just in your business—but in your everyday life as well.

[01:00:00] Lauren Duke (cont.):
Burnout—you hear about burnout every two seconds, it feels like.
On social media, agents saying, “I’m so tired. I’m so burnt out. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Well—it’s because you’re not doing things holistically.

So for example, for myself—my core values are:

• Stability
• Contribution
• Creativity

And I ask myself—on big decisions like:

• “Should we do this service?”
• “Should we introduce this product?”

…down to:

• “Should I buy this thing on Amazon?”

Is it going to provide stability or is it going to take away from my family’s financial stability?

Am I able to contribute to the real estate industry—but also contribute to my kids?

Am I able to be creative in all of these aspects?

So narrowing down your core values—that’s going to create the basis of:

• your messaging
• your hiring
• your team development

For example—if education, empowerment, and community are three of your core values—
Then yes, you should probably go start a team.
Because you want to pour into people and create that welcoming environment where people feel like they can ask anything.

But if your core values are more like… (I’m drawing a blank right now, unfortunately)—

[01:01:54] Tracy Hayes:
That’s alright!

[01:01:55] Lauren Duke:
If your core values are more like:
“I want to persevere for myself.”
There’s nothing wrong with that.
But go build a micro team, where you have 3 or 4 admin doing the day-to-day things, and—

[01:01:54] Tracy Hayes:
—You're focused on building those relationships.

Do you suggest—or go in and analyze—like a DISC assessment or something similar to that with them?

[01:02:00] Lauren Duke:
We do a little bit, yeah.

[01:02:03] Tracy Hayes:
Mm-hmm.

[01:02:04] Lauren Duke:
I don’t do it fully, only because I know—even for myself—I’ve rigged a DISC assessment before.
This was back before I even knew what DISC was.

I was applying for some virtual assistant job and it said:

• Must be detail-oriented,
• Must be on top of deadlines…
  And I was like,
  “Oh yeah, I can do that. No problem.”

So I answered like I was that person.
It came up that I was an S/C.

I’ve taken it a million times since—and no, I’m a D/I, for sure.

[01:02:36] Tracy Hayes:
Well, I think that comes with a grain of salt—we’ll say it that way.

I mean, the unique thing about this business—and for those still listening to us here go on—

What I’m digging into, and what Lauren is coming across with is:

This business is so unique.
You can’t really…

Authenticity is a word we haven’t used—

[01:03:00] Tracy Hayes:
…today, but it has often come up when I'm talking to top agents and what their success is. They're authentic. They're them. They're doing things that they like to do within the confines of the business because there really is, if there was 10 ways to lead generate, you're not good at all 10. You might be good at one, two, and three. That's—then go do one, two, and three. And you could have a successful business.

You don't have to be successful… actually doing all 10 would probably make you unsuccessful because you'd be so scattered across the planes. You really never would focus deep enough on any one lead generation source.

But this business is unique and you need people like Lauren because every agent that I'm sure—every… you could probably say, well, this agent's like that agent—but they're not. They're two different people. They look differently. They sound differently. Live in different neighborhoods or whatever. You name it, they're different.

And I think, you know, getting with Lauren and digging deep—as with any real estate coach, really—but she's going to give you the ops side. Your typical real estate coach is not going to also give you this whole perspective like, okay, this is the backend business to support this business you just described, and you really need to sit down with someone like Lauren and dig deep on how you want your business to look like.

What do you like doing? What gets you outta bed in the morning? And that, I imagine you really start there. What makes you happy? And go and just really go deep on it, right?

[01:04:39] Lauren Duke:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The whole like set the vision and then the core values mapping is a very large portion of the program.

[01:04:44] Tracy Hayes:
You have on here in "so much more." What haven't we talked about?

[01:04:55] Lauren Duke:
So we do have our one-on-one coaching for operations development and that's really your admin person. We're gonna train them, we're gonna develop them, we're gonna make them the growth partner that you need by your side versus the check-the-box task checker.

And then with that, we also have our Core Ops Community, which is just for operations—real estate operations people only. We have our Inside Our DOO Bootcamp, just to go through, you know, how to become a better leader. We're having weekly masterminds. We're having, you know, new guides and templates and all of those sort of things that the ops person can go in and be around like-minded growth partners.

[01:05:36] Tracy Hayes:
So this is obvious to me, but I doubt it's obvious for most. And I—from this standpoint, I think a lot of agents, you know, hire a friend or whatever, or “be my assistant.” Okay, well what's that assistant going to… you're—and some of 'em are paying them a salary. Well, what are they—what are they supposed to do for you for eight hours a day? Five days a week? What are they supposed to be doing?

The real estate agent has no idea, 'cause he has never been an assistant, they've only been a real estate agent. I imagine you help them set some—a job description, some—the tasks they need to be doing on a daily basis, and how they should set their schedule and so forth. Am I right?

[01:06:22] Lauren Duke:
Yeah. We're doing a lot of that in our Strategy to Scale program actually. And so the one-on-one coaching would be, okay, now you have that admin, let's build them up even further. Or if you've previously set up systems on your own and you hired an admin, we can start with one-on-one coaching and figure out where the gaps are, figure out, you know, how to really embrace that role that they're in.

[01:06:51] Tracy Hayes:
Give us some things that—that is if you're a solo agent right now. You're doing really well and you choose that the first person that you're going to expand the team on is an assistant, which I know there's some people that tell you that is actually who you should bring on first. What are some of the things that they should immediately be taking off your hands right from the get go?

And then, you know, based on your coaching, your experience with different agents. 'Cause I know some agents like to take their things a little bit further, but really what you need to coach that assistant up to be doing, to really maximize, obviously, their time, but also leverage them to be more you as a real estate agent.

[01:07:34] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, we like to say that your assistant should be an extension of you. So they need to know what your, you know, values are, what your brand messaging is, how you're showing up in all of these places. And so if you get a lot of your leads from Facebook group—not one that you run, but one that you know, you're just a member of, but you're commenting, “Hey, download my buyer guide,” things like that, right?

They can go and show up in that same exact way. They can make sure that your past client touch plan is being, you know, seen to the end, because those handwritten note cards that we mentioned before—they can be doing those. They can go through and audit your CRM, make sure that every piece of data or, you know, contact information, whatever it is, is indeed in there.

They can—I could go on literally forever on what an admin can do for you, right? But they can take social media off of your plate. They can take lead follow-up off of your plate. It truly depends on what—what don't you like doing, you know? That's part of the scale framework as well as doing a time audit.

[01:09:00] Lauren Duke:
Just like you go to the doctor if you wanna lose weight and he's like, "Hey, write down what you eat every day for a week." We have you do the same thing. Write down what you do every day for a week. Don't like include the "I checked Facebook for five minutes"—those little things—because over the course of the day, that's gonna equal an hour.

[01:09:10] Tracy Hayes:
I bet. Well, and the important things for the listeners out there—as I'm sure Lauren understands—there are people actually who have people who are monitoring their social media, going on and interacting, because social media is designed to be social. And if you are not responding—well, you may not have time to go in and respond—but if you're paying an assistant to go on and take, you know, 15, 20 minutes on each of your social medias a day, go through and make, you know, complete comments to people, full sentences versus just the like—that doesn't do anything, I'm told.

But that you're actually, you know, making comments. They want a social interaction. So if you're going on and reaching—you know, your past client comes up—"Oh, I did... what a great birthday party, looks like you guys had a great time," whatever. You need to be making those comments. And if you don't have time to do it, you need to—that's obviously something, one of the things, the assistant—so Lauren's gonna have that list of many things that your assistant can be doing.

So to make sure you're not just throwing money and they're sitting in there watching soap operas when they could be, you know—you know, have you done this today? This should be on their checklist. Have you done all these, these chores today? And if you've completed those, here's several other things that you can continue doing to fill out your day.

But I would imagine most people either don't hire one because they don't have a full list of things they should be doing and don't think they have enough work for them to do when really there actually could be work for them to be doing, unorganized.

Now, you—you CRM and entering names and stuff in the CRM—very important. I did see something, I don't know if it was an ad somewhere or someone told me—there's a CRM out there now where you can actually voice it. Say, "Hey, add John Smith with phone number 123 to the, you know, database," and it will do it. Which, technology's gonna get us there.

But yeah, people still—you would think. I had Marki Lemons who, um, outta Chicago, does the podcast for NAR and she's very involved, instructor and everything. She's—well, if you follow on LinkedIn, Marki Lemons comes up all the time. But she said—she—but I imagine she might not do it today—but in her heyday, her goal was actually to add eight people to her CRM every day.

[01:11:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.):
Yeah. So all of a sudden you just—so everyone you meet and shake hands with, you're at the grocery store and exchange—you’re getting their information and you're adding that to your CRM every day to do that follow-up. Every new person that you meet or come in contact with to try to add their information to your CRM so they start receiving your information.

[01:11:20] Lauren Duke:
Absolutely. Yeah.

[01:11:22] Tracy Hayes:
Yeah. And obviously a lot of people, by the end of the day you're like, whatever, and you don't remember. But if you have that assistant, you know, the assistant could be looking that person up and looking that person's Facebook and getting their information and adding 'em to your CRM. So…

[01:11:35] Lauren Duke:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

[01:11:37] Tracy Hayes:
Let me—I’m gonna—I had, um, what I've been doing is—I have Chat—I've pulled all, you know, all the information you gave me—your website and everything, obviously your bio—and I had obviously ChatGPT create a—gives me an outline. Now, I haven't looked at any one of these questions yet.

Well, I know what I actually wrote down here. I want you to—you mentioned it earlier and I think you just mentioned it a little bit ago—your brand voice. And I would bet also that a lot—and I want—I want everyone listening to understand why I've said this several times—why most, many agents are trudging through.

Yeah, there are very few who are just flying high because they've got systems like Lauren can help you put together. They have this brand voice, you call it, and I think it—you gotta have your brand is out there. They're being trained, oh, you gotta—you know, your brand. What does that even mean?

Because I think most people have no idea what that truly, truly means and how important it is to really get you—have you seen the movie Formula One with, um, just came out this summer with Brad Pitt? Brad Pitt’s asked—he's the, obviously the race car driver. He's older and, you know, he's—they're like, "Brad, why do you keep doing—" not Brad's not his name in the movie—but they're asking, "Why do you keep doing this?"

And I—he basically says something like, "'Cause I'm—I'm waiting for the day that I am just like," and I think he might've used a different word, "but just coasting around the track, just like he's floating on air," you know, type of thing. Everything is—all these systems and everything is all, you know, working at its just perfect, optimum levels, right?

And part of the—reaching that optimal level of success in business is the brand. And I think that's one thing where everyone could have an opportunity to improve, but explain to us what you—and you say you could help find their brand voice or, you know, help 'em establish that. What does that really mean to the agent?

[01:14:26] Lauren Duke:
Figuring out, through your messaging, how are you showing up consistently? If you are going to have someone come into your business, how are they going on those same Facebook pages and making sure that they understand what it is that you embody?

And so, if one of your core values is education, right? Making sure that in every comment that they leave, they're providing some sort of education. Or when you're building out your buyer guide, your seller guide, your listing presentation, all of that—is it centered around education?

Or, you know, how are we making sure that all messaging is consistent across the board?

If you are just going in and saying, "I help buyers and sellers in their real estate journey." Great. So are 1.4 million other people. What is it that you do, right, that is setting you apart from all of them?

I think in Florida—I used that last year on something—it was like 1.4 million Realtors in the US and in Florida there’s like 180,000 alone, you know?

[01:15:46] Lauren Duke (cont.):
And so how—especially in Florida, because there's a gazillion of us—how are we making sure that you're setting yourself up, you know…

[01:15:55] Tracy Hayes:
You're one of those planned names. Well, no, no. I like it. I want to—and this is where, you know, someone getting with someone like Lauren can help you drill down on it. If education is your thing, like you say, you're giving a little nugget, you're telling a little story. You know, to help, you know, improve—you know, like you said, I just help buyers and sellers. Well, so does every other agent.

[01:16:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.):
What do you do?

[01:16:44] Tracy Hayes:
That's your baseline. What is it that's special about you, that you provide? And I had an agent on, Michelle Trimble just, uh, a couple weeks ago. She really—she focuses on high-end properties out here in Ponte Vedra Beach, which is, you know, near the TPC Sawgrass where the golf tournament's held and everything. High-end homes, obviously—they're on the water and on the golf course or both. And I forget the word she used, but basically when she does an open house, she's got champagne glasses, she's got—she goes all out, I mean—to really make it a really special thing, an event. That's what she's building her brand around.

[01:16:47] Lauren Duke:
Yeah. She turns it into an event. It's not just something for lead gen that she has to do. She goes all in on it. If you embody education and you're showing up on a Facebook comment saying, "Oh, I can help you." Okay...

[01:17:00] Tracy Hayes:
Right. Great. You're not giving them anything else.

[01:17:03] Lauren Duke:
Right.

[01:17:04] Tracy Hayes:
You know? Right. Always be looking to add a little nugget of knowledge.

[01:17:07] Lauren Duke:
Right, right.

[01:17:08] Tracy Hayes:
Yeah, I like that. I like that. So this is stuff that you need to drill down—but going back to Brad Pitt and driving around the racetrack on air—if you want your real estate business to be, you know, coasting around the track (which, if you haven't seen Formula One, it's actually a pretty good movie), it's not a "men's movie," it's actually not too bad. I wouldn't rate it as, maybe, the Mission Impossible-level movie, but for those who like—just a good movie—definitely when it comes out on the streaming gig, just get it.

But anyway, if you want your real estate business to be coasting on air, you’ve gotta get with Lauren or someone just like her and get these back office systems down pat. Get everything running on auto. Get—knowing your assistant should know what to do every day and be your assistant—and be there and basically almost finish your sentences. Would you agree?

[01:18:00] Lauren Duke:
Yeah.

[01:18:01] Tracy Hayes:
They need to be that well in tuned with your business. They need to be doing—knowing what needs to be done every day so you can be moving forward and be out there.

But Lauren, is there anything else you'd like to add?

[01:18:13] Lauren Duke:
No, I don't think so. I think we covered...

[01:18:16] Tracy Hayes:
Yeah. So Lauren’s information is obviously going to be in the show notes—all her links, coreopscollective.com. Reach out to her. Reach out to her team. There's some—you have some other teammates. Do you want to just say a little bit about the other two ladies on your team there?

[01:18:32] Lauren Duke:
Yeah, we actually have—we have a few people on our team. So we have our Director of Operations, Shannon Blackard. She is a former educator, she's a former real estate team operations manager, and she is—gosh—she's just been such a blessing to have on our team because we have truly catapulted since she came on. And so she's one of our strategists, she's one of our coaches—she really is my right hand.

We also have our Executive Assistant, Lauren Wyatt. She was my first hire for Core Ops. And at the time I was like, "Oh, another Lauren—yeah, what a great idea." Now we call her "The Other Lauren" because it gets a little confusing. It’s a nice running joke. She is the most consistent, most, you know, determined and honestly dependable person that you could ask for on your team. She is going through and optimizing and really building out our client care department right now, and I know she's gonna head that up fantastically.

We've got our Social Media Coordinator, Victoria—Victoria Holiday. She is—you wouldn’t be able to tell: is it me or is it Victoria posting this? Commenting on this? You know?

[01:20:00] Lauren Duke (cont.):
She's the extension of me for social media, and that has been life-changing.

And then we have someone who helps with our Strategy to Scale service. She does a lot of the implementation, the creative design, and things like that. Her name is Brittany Reeves. We outsource her right now—she owns her own virtual assistant business called Bright Solutions—but she... she’ll be in-house one day.

[01:20:23] Tracy Hayes:
Excellent. Yeah. But reach out—reach out to the team here if you're interested in learning more in detail what they can do for you.

Lauren, I appreciate you. Hang on—when I hit the thing, it's gonna kind of pause for when I turn the video off. It’s gonna pause for a second and then come back on. But stay on for a moment here after the show. But again—coreopscollective.com—Lauren Duke, thank you for coming on the show today.

[01:20:57] Lauren Duke:
Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.