Streamlining Scaling Operations: How to Go Virtual Without Getting Overwhelmed

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, host of the Process Breakdown podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Check out past episodes. We had David Allen of Getting Things Done, Michael Gerber of The E-Myth and many, many more. Heather Roemmich is the perfect person to talk about exactly what we will talk about today, which is streamlining and scaling operations. Before I introduce her, this episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. Have you had team members and this is a rhetorical question, but have you had team members ask you the same questions over and over again?

Heather Roemmich: Oh, yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And, the time you spent explaining it? There’s actually a better way. There is a solution. SweetProcess is a software that makes it drop dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff. Not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but first responder government agencies use them in life or death situations to run their operations. You can use SweetProcess to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time, so you can focus on growing your team and you can sign up for a free 14 day trial. There’s no credit card required. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy, S-W-E-E-Tprocess.com.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I am really excited. Heather Roemmich is the COO of Canzell Realty and I guess you’ll tell me if this is correct or not, but if you’re a buyer, they help you find your dream home. If you’re a seller, they help you with an easy exit process. So Heather, thanks for joining me.

Heather Roemmich: Absolutely, thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: The topic we talked about before we hit record was how you scaled a local real estate brokerage to almost 10 states in the last year by streamlining and scaling processes to go virtual, and I want to talk about one of the points that you’ve made, which is making it easy for people, and you said one of the easy thing you do for agents is help them with the technology piece. So, what did you mean by that?

Heather Roemmich: So, a lot of agents… As most of you know, there’s tons of technology out there now. We have everything at our fingertips and it can be overwhelming, especially for agents who have been in the business for a long time, this is kind of inundating them with technology. And so, what we found was that a lot of software that you will provide people to help grow their business, help streamline their business, there’s a really low adoption rate to it. And, that’s because the curve for it and just the amount of technology that you have, because you have one that made you transaction management, you may have one that is your CRM, you may have one that it’s somewhere you get digital signatures from. It’s just so much, and so what we did was we created an internal site for our agents that’s literally like an iPhone that has buttons and they can click and it automatically logs them into that program.

Heather Roemmich: And so, they don’t have to remember, oh my goodness, where do I go if I want to send out a drip campaign or where do I want to go if I want to make automated marketing materials? It’s all in this really easy to use backend that they can just hit buttons and find. And when we did that, we found that the adoption rate is so much higher and the agents are more likely to use that technology because it’s easy for them to get to. They can get to it from their phone, they can get to it from their computer, and that’s the biggest thing is we’ve found that you have to make everything… Everything we do we ask, is this easy enough for somebody to come off the street who is 16 years old or 80 years old? They should be able to do this. We try to make it that easy for them.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You’ve brought all the different technology under one roof to make it easier.

Heather Roemmich: Yes, and that’s where… The agents, they forget their, what was my username for that? My username for this one is my email address. For here, it’s this. They can’t remember it all. And so, what we did was we used programs to just bring all the APIs in, have single sign on and they can get to everything from the easy click of a button, and that was where we found… Because we were getting frustrated and I know a lot of business owners are frustrated. They spend all this money on technology, but nobody’s using it. And we’re like, why aren’t you using this? This is going to make… Quit creating a social media ad in Canva or by hand. It’s automatically pulled from the MLS and created for you. Why aren’t you using it? And they’re like, “I don’t remember how to log in to that.” Well, we were like, “We can fix that.” And so what I did was created… Every time we bring a new technology platform in, we just make it really easy for them to get to.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: But, how many would you say are under that roof that people that you have? How many different technologies?

Heather Roemmich: Oh gosh, well there’s just so much. We probably currently offer our agents between 10 to 12 different technologies now because in a real estate transaction, you have everything from the document storage, to the transaction management software itself, to marketing material software, all of that is different technology platforms that are really great. So, we find the best of the best, and then we bring it in for our agents and we bring it all together, so it’s cohesive and everything kind of talks to each other.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And then, talk about onboarding a new agent.

Heather Roemmich: Yes, so that’s the thing is… So, when we were a traditional brick and mortar, when we had that mindset a couple of years ago and previous, everything was done in… You came into the office to onboard, you came in to sign documents, everything was done manually. And so, one of the ways that we’ve been able to grow and scale so quickly is by automating processes and making them virtual, and we actually had this vision pre-COVID. We had just cast our vision to our company right before everything happened, having no idea what we were facing in 2020. So we were already-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Good thing.

Heather Roemmich: Yes, thank goodness. So, it was a very easy transition for us because we were already using technologies online. And so, what we do now to onboard an agent, because we onboard an agent, we are everywhere. We’re East Coast to West Coast, so we are everywhere from Virginia to Washington State. And so, we don’t do brick and mortar stores anymore. So, it’s all done virtually. So, we actually collect all of their data online. We try to do it… One of the things is culture for us is really important. And so, we try to do it in a fun way. It’ll say, “We love celebrating birthdays. What day should we celebrate yours?”

Heather Roemmich: It asks fun questions, but it collects the data we need in our system to be able to produce their onboarding documents. So, they’re able to see which state they’re in. Once we know which state we’re in, we know which documents to push out to them and they do it all online. So, we collect all their data, we collect their headshot, we collect all of that information. And then as soon as they hit submit, they’re automatically sent electronically, all of the onboarding documents they have to sign for us. Once that’s signed, we move them onto the next phase in onboarding, and it’s all just done in this very systematized process. And so, every time someone signs a document, it’s like, “Hey, this person signed another document.” Then, it moves into the next portion of the onboarding process.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So, talk about the decision for expansion because some people want to go nationwide, some people want to stay hyper-local.

Heather Roemmich: Yeah, so basically what we did was years ago, when we were first starting out as our own brokerage, we really thought we might go the franchise model. So, we would sell franchises nationwide, and we actually were set up to do that. And then, we kind of were like, “Wait a second. Can we do this in a more cost-efficient way and a more scalable way?” Because to open a new building anywhere, it’s expensive. There’s a lot of overhead to that. You have to find the building. They all looked the same, and we did that locally. We had seven offices just in our area and we kind of treated them each as a franchise to see how that worked. They each ran their own P&L. So, we experimented that, and while it was profitable, we were like, “There has to be a better way.” So about two years ago, we decided the way we wanted to scale was to scale kind of… It wasn’t like a full virtual, but in this virtual model where we could actually scale to states without having to franchise.

Heather Roemmich: So, we would still own them all, but giving people opportunities to run businesses without the cost of an overhead. And so, that’s where we kind of got the initial mindset. And so, we had already started to do things within our local market that was every transaction was paperless. Nobody came into an office anymore to turn a contract in. Everything is done virtually. And so, we were already doing that, and as we started to make this shift, we noticed agents weren’t coming in the offices more. So we were like, “Okay, so they can work from anywhere. Why do we continue to have these buildings that they may stop in for an hour or two a week?” And so, what we did was we decided that as the leases on our buildings started to expire, we weren’t going to renew them and we moved to co-working spaces and they love it because they can get together here and there to connect with people, but we are able to reach such a larger group of people by doing everything virtually.

Heather Roemmich: So, we were already doing broker meetings on Zoom pre-COVID. We were already doing a lot of that. Now, people still love the social interaction. Real estate agents are social beings. That’s why they get into real estate. They love talking to people they want to be around. And so, we were able to kind of do this mix of both. And by doing this, we were able to scale nationally so much quicker because we aren’t looking for a building. We don’t have to have an admin sit in it. We don’t have to have a leader for it. We don’t have to buy furniture.

Heather Roemmich: If I get a broker that says, “I want to open in South Carolina,” I can set up our business and we can be open in that state in a month, and it just moves so much quicker and we can grow them and manage them from anywhere. So, we don’t have to necessarily find the perfect leader in that area. We may have someone in Jersey that is a great leader for them and they can mentor them and do everything virtually.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You’ve created this virtual operational efficiency as opposed to what the old way was, which would be in-person and co-working spaces are amazing. They’re super professional. You could rent private offices. They also have a bunch of amenities, so it just makes it really easy, especially now. I remember when I went to Arizona for two months and I just rented an office there. So, it was really easy. I wanted to talk about… One of the things that you have, which is unique, which is accountability and coaching because on average I think you were saying let’s say an agent sells around three homes a year and people are kind of in their own bubble, right?

Heather Roemmich: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And so, talk about the thought in the evolution of this accountability and coaching.

Heather Roemmich: Yes, so when we started out in real estate, we were more like a mega team. So, we were just a team of agents. Chantel was the leader and we had this just team underneath of her. When you’re a small team, that’s very easy to have accountability and coaching because there’s 20 of them, there’s 30 of them. But as we grew, we noticed that agents really yearned for that, but in a way that they wanted to kind of still be their agents because they’re independent contractors, they get to kind of be their own boss, but they also still look for some type of coaching. And if you think about it, even top athletes have trainers, very few people can hold themselves accountable. And so, people come in the real estate industry thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is great. I can go get my hair done at two o’clock if I want. I don’t have to work nine to five,” and that is absolutely true.

Heather Roemmich: That’s one of the really great things about working in real estate, but what people don’t realize is if they don’t set certain goals for themselves, they will quickly find out that they’re not going to sell anything, and if they’re not selling anything, they’re not going to make any money. So, what we tried to do was we created this leadership model. So, a lot of purely virtual companies out there, they might give you a great technology package, but they’re missing leadership. And so, all of our agents have access to a circle leader, a mentor, a managing partner, and a managing broker, and what we do is we have these groups that they get to join, and we kind of start this from the very beginning.

Heather Roemmich: So, we start these accountability groups. It’s not a requirement, but what they do is they see other agents doing really well and they’re like, “Hey, how are they doing that?” And we say, “Well, they’re in an accountability group.” And so, then they want to join, and what we do is we have weekly meetings and there’s three commitments that they make each week. And those three commitments, we always encourage them to be income producing commitments. So say for instance, like when I was coaching agents, I would have said, “Okay, what is something that you want to do this week to bring income? So, what do you want to do to get five more clients?” So the goal would say, I want to add five new clients to my CRM this week. So, that’s the commitment, so we set smart goals and I say, “okay, How are you going to do that? What are your action steps?”

Heather Roemmich: My action steps are I’m going to spend one hour each day calling… Monday I’m going to call the A’s in my contact list. Tuesday, I’m going to call the B’s. Three… So, we set it out and I’m going to do this by Friday at 5:00 PM. And then, so they’ve set these three goals. Then when we meet next week, we go around and we say, “All right, how did you do on your commitments last week?” And they’ll say, “I hit three out of three.” And we’re like, “Yay, great job. What are you going to do this week?” And then if they say, “No, I only hit one out of three.” We say, “Okay, what happened? Tell me what happened, what got in the way?” And then they’ll say, “Oh, my car broke down, my kid was sick,” whatever it might be.

Heather Roemmich: And I always ask them, “If I would’ve put $1 million on the table and said, ‘If you hit these three commitments, you can have a million dollars,’ would you have hit those three commitments?” And they’ll say, “Well yeah, I probably would have.” And then I say, “What could you have done to overcome that?” And so we coach them, and so each week they make these three commitments. The three commitments are towards their big goal. This year I want to make $100,000, this year I want to take my family to Disney, whatever it might be. And so, each week they’re taking action steps towards that, and that’s what helps them get off the ground and running. Most real estate agents have a really hard time doing that because they have no one holding them accountable and teaching them what they need to do to have action steps towards their big goal.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Heather, I love that. That applies to any industry like you said.

Heather Roemmich: Any.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Any other top performers, all of them have coaches. They not only have coaches, they have coaches in specific areas of their life. It could be their nutrition, it could be [crosstalk 00:15:14], it could be a mindset… All the specific areas, so that’s pretty amazing. And, talk about how many people do you find is a good number for the accountability group and how long are the meetings?

Heather Roemmich: You don’t want to make them too long because one, agents don’t want to be in meetings. In general, employees don’t want to be in meetings. So, we try to make them no more than 30 minutes. I have found that my best accountability groups have between four and six people in them. When I did it with agents and now I do it at a corporate level, so every week my corporate team meets and we do this exact same thing. We all set three commitments every week. I set three commitments every week, we hold each other accountable. And so, what I found when I did it with agents in particular was when I did these groups of four to six, I would pair newer agents and seasoned agents. So, I didn’t just take all my top performers and throw them in an accountability group together because the best thing they can learn from each other… And, newer agents want to learn from top people.

Heather Roemmich: And so, it was such a great mix that a lot of times I would start the conversation and then I would sit back and watch it happen because they helped each other solve problems, and they grew into this cohesive group that just they started doing it on their own. And so, I found that a lot of times you’ll think, “Well, let me put all my top performers in a group together and let me put these people because they have similarities.” Honestly, I would put people… You know the personalities of your group that really would benefit each other and help grow each other because sometimes even someone that might be brand new who has come from another industry, might be able to teach a top agent something. And so, you don’t want to get in the mindset of only grouping people together that way, and that really, really… Some of my most successful accountability groups were a mixture of these different levels of expertise, but really helped each other grow.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: It’s so important for you in the company to follow processes and systems that you hire leaders or make sure leaders do it accordingly. Talk about that decision and what you mean.

Heather Roemmich: Yes, so I always tell people to make sure you hire leaders who are willing to follow the process. Now when I say this, I don’t say this to say, “They should just fall in line and never ever say, ‘Hey, why are we doing it this way?’ This might not make sense.'” Because you want people who are willing to say, “Hey, this process might not be so great. Should we re-look at it?” But, not people who ask for exceptions. That’s what I’m talking about when I say hire leaders who will follow your processes and don’t ask for exceptions. Let me tell you why. So when you create processes and systems, the reason you’re doing that is because you want to create a flywheel that once it starts moving, it doesn’t have to stop because every time an exception is asked the flywheel stops.

Heather Roemmich: And when the fly wheel stops, everybody stops, from the admin that’s inputting something, to the top level, C-level executive. And so, you don’t realize how much it can cost your organization to have to stop and make an exception. And so, it’s really important to have these people that do this. And so, I’ll give you an example. We have agents who will come in and a leader will come in and say, “Oh, my top agent, they don’t want to pay 100 bucks a month for…” And, we only have one charge a month, that’s 50 bucks for E&O. And so, like say they came in and said they don’t want this charge and I’ll look at them and say, “I’m not stopping the charge. They’re going to have to pay it just like everyone else does because if I have to create a system that doesn’t charge this agent only, then it stops the whole system and then that breaks something and then that breaks something.

Heather Roemmich: I had one manager in particular who asked for a lot of exceptions and I finally said, “Every time you ask me for an exception, I’m charging $100, so it better be that important to you because you’re stopping production every time you ask for an exception?” Not only can we do it, but it stops production. And so, it’s really important to hire people that are willing to follow the process, but also are willing to speak up when they think that… Processes do need to change as time happens, and it’s important to have people that will point out the good changes, but not just constantly ask for an exception, and the reason they usually do it is because they don’t want to have a conversation with someone.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So important. I want to, Heather, talk about customer service and your customer service systems, and I was reading on your site and I don’t know if this part is up to date, but it demonstrates kind of you’re really proactive and really value customer service [crosstalk 00:20:03]-

Heather Roemmich: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Five rings, five minutes, or $5 guaranteed. I don’t know what that was referring to, but it just tells me they really take this seriously. Talk about the customer service.

Heather Roemmich: Yes, so above anything else, customer service is most important for us and real estate, it’s a client relationship business. The whole reason we started our company was because in a lot of instances in real estate you may call an agent and not hear back. You may call an agent and not hear back for two days. Well, especially in the market that we’re in right now, if you aren’t getting called back within five minutes, you could be missing out on that property. We’re in a really strange market right now where it is just crazy fast. Everything’s moving very quickly and customer service is our top priority. If you look around, in our one location that we do have, and we put it all on our websites, when we make decisions in our company, the first thing we always ask is, how will this affect the client?

Heather Roemmich: The next is, how will it affect our team? And then, lastly is yourself. And so, we really try to promote a culture of client first. And, I can’t tell you how many times a deal is kind of going south, and our agents will step right up and say, “I’ll cut my commission. I’ll take care of it. I’ll buy the refrigerator.” Because the clients are our number one priority, making sure that they get… So, the five rings, five minutes or $5 gift card means that if you call and you don’t get a call back within five minutes, you can fill out the form and we’ll send you a $5 gift card because that’s how important it is. We have a call center that’s open from 8:00 to 9:00 every single day of the week that’s here to take your calls, making sure you never miss a call if you’re a client of ours. And if you’re looking, to making sure you’re not missing out on your dream home. And so, customer service is top, top priority. We do whatever we can to make sure our clients are happy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I wish some of these other organizations adopted that. There’s been one company I’ve been trying to call for like four days. I just get busy signal. It’s crazy.

Heather Roemmich: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So, thanks for caring about that. There’s another example of you’re saying averages, selling three homes a year, and there was a principal broker and how he went from three homes to… Because of the processes and systems. What happened with that?

Heather Roemmich: Yeah, so he’s actually our principal broker for our Virginia offices and he worked for another real estate company. He’s been with us for over 10 years now. And so when he first came, he was only selling about three houses a year. He had another job that he worked in order to try to supplement, and that’s what you see a lot of times in real estate, which is why they necessarily don’t call back very quickly because they’re working another job. And so he came on, his first year with us I think he sold over 30 homes and he now closes 60 to 80 homes a year himself. He’s created a team, he’s our principal broker, and he closes about a half a million in total gross commission each year just because of the systems that we’re able to produce for him. He was probably working the same amount of hours he was before, but he’s been able to just massively increase his income and production because the systems and processes that we give our agents allow them to do so much more work in the same exact amount of time.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So, would you attribute it to their systems and processes put in place, like for instance, that custom dashboard where all the technology are brought in, there is accountability and coaching, and anything else that we are missing is like a big, strong piece and obviously the backend of the customer service of the company supporting that?

Heather Roemmich: Yes, one of the things that I think has helped us really grow in scale as well is having multiple revenue income for agents. Most real estate agents have one source of income and that’s commission, and you can only work so many hours in a day. I don’t care how efficient you are. You get to a max that you’re like, “I’m working 12 hours a day. I’m doing everything as efficiently as I can. I can’t sell any more homes. There’s just no more time in my day.” And so, what we did was we wanted to solve that problem because one of the things about real estate in particular is a lot of agents don’t have a way to create passive income and/or retirement income. And so we were like, “Hey, there’s got to be a better way to do this”. So, what we’ve done is because we went virtual, we were able to reduce a lot of overhead costs.

Heather Roemmich: We don’t have to pay for buildings, we don’t have to pay for all of these different things. So, we’re able to… Our agents have their commissions, they’re able to cap each year. So after they contribute 14,000 in company dollar for the year, they get a 100% of their commission for the rest of the year until they reset again. So that’s their first, second is they can mentor agents and they collect a percentage of commission for that. So, if they’re already helping answer questions, why not get paid for it? So, we have the circle leaders, the managing brokers, the managing partners, they get leadership pay for helping coach those agents, and it doesn’t come out of the… The agents don’t pay anything, it’s all paid for by the company. So, an agent gets their exact same split, no difference to them, but they have all these different level of leaders and the leaders collect a percentage of the company dollar they bring in every month.

Heather Roemmich: So for instance, the managing broker, not only does he do commissions, he also collects a percentage of the people that he’s the broker of. So, he helps answer questions and he’s compensated for that time. Then if they bring in agents, if they sponsor agents, they have revenue share and they can collect up to 25% of the company dollar of those agents that they sponsor, and they can get an additional 6% if those agents bring people in. So, every single month we pay revenue share to agents. I have one agent who makes $4,000 a month just in revenue share because they’ve said, “Oh, I love working here.” Do you want to come work here? They come, and they collect a percentage.

Heather Roemmich: So, we’ve created all these and they get stocks. So, we have stock options for them. So, now they have a retirement plan, they have additional income streams. We have seen agents double what they were making, but they sell the exact same amount of homes because they have all these other revenue streams coming in. And, that has helped attract us in other areas, markets outside of our own because agents are tired of just spinning the flywheel and making the same amount of money every year. They want to be able to work smarter, not necessarily harder, and we give them all of these different opportunities.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, Heather, it really just fuels a collaborative environment because people are being paid for their time to help and also helps a lot with recruiting and having people recommend the company.

Heather Roemmich: Yes, absolutely, and it helps get things going and it just creates opportunities for agents, and that’s one of the things we wanted to do is be able to create an environment where agents have the opportunity to have truly unlimited revenue potential because there’s only so many hours in a day. And so, we wanted to create different revenue streams for them for that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Heather, first of all, I want to thank you. I have one last question before we end. And before you answer it, I’d love to hear some of your favorite leadership books or resources. But before you answer that, I want to point people towards your website. People can check out Canzell, it’s C-A-N-Z-E-L-L.com and check out what they have going on there. Are there any other places we should point them online or on the website?

Heather Roemmich: Yes, we have Canzell Realty, that’s canzell.com. If you want to look for homes, we have canzellhomes.com. You can get to everything, again, like we make it for agents, for our clients. You can get to everything from our homepage, they’re all able to go there and check everything out. If you’re interested in how we compensate our agents and do different things, we also have joincanzell.com and that gives you all the different leadership opportunities and agent opportunities with us.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So, thank you. Check it out. It’s a very user-friendly, intuitive site. What are some of your favorite leadership books or resources that you recommend?

Heather Roemmich: Yes, so we are huge listeners of podcasts here. So, our management team listens to a podcast every single week, and then we discuss that on our management call and we don’t discuss what we necessarily learned from it, but what we’re going to implement from it. So, I’m a huge EntreLeadership podcast listener. I listen to almost all of their episodes. Craig Groeschel has some great ones. I love Patrick Lencioni, and his books Good to Great, The Four Levels of Execution. We have a little leadership library I have in my office that agents and/or employees can come and check out a book at any time.

Heather Roemmich: StrengthFinders, we just really try to grow people in their leadership and just try to think of what can we do to take our company one step better, and like I said, we listen every single week, we listen to a podcast together as a leadership team and we encourage our agents to do that as well, and we reward. So whoever comes up with the best implementation, we give gift cards out, so they know to come not to just say, “Oh, I listened to this podcast and this is what I got from it.” It’s, “I listened to this podcast, I got this out of it, and this is what we need to implement to make our business better.”

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Heather, I’m going to be the first one to thank you. Everyone check out Canzell, C-A-N-Z-E-L-L.com. Check out more episodes of the podcast, check SweetProcess. Thanks, everyone.

Heather Roemmich: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown podcast. Before you go, quick question. Do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and/or policies for your company, so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for our free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy, and process like process.com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk-free 14-day trial.

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