Alright. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to today's three o'clock team slots for the Ascend, spring marathon. Excited to be here today. We've had a great marathon so far. A lot of amazing attendance. I hope everybody is finding a lot of value. I know I've enjoyed being a part of this journey with all of you. On three o'clock hours here, we're talking about ways that teams, can maximize, different tools, different strategies to help your agents and your team win, through this spring marathon as we gear up to make twenty twenty five the absolute best year possible in the face of some challenges. Right? Rates haven't come down quite the way we'd hoped. Transaction count is not up the way we'd hoped for twenty twenty five. We're gonna make the best of it and win here together at LPT Realty. I am joined today by the amazing Shana Moats. Dave, if we can bring in Shana, coming to us live, from Texas. Hey, everyone. How's it going? Alright. At the spotlight. There we go. Hey, Shana. Hey. And, so today, Shana's gonna be taking us through, team tools. A lot of these tools are part of the offering team growth plus, not all, but most of them. And again, we're here to really highlight the tools that I believe, and I've handpicked a lot of these to be a part of LPT team growth plus as the most important tools and strategies that teams need to to win in today's market. And then as always, we've got door prizes. So we're gonna be drawing team leader names from today's session, to win some free months of that Team Growth Plus product, which includes amazing technology like corded dot io and Xudilio and our cash offer power packs. But with that, Shane, I'm gonna turn it over to you. I know you've got a, slide presentation for us, and we're excited, to have this session together. Awesome. Well, let's jump in. My name is Shane Amotz. Like Robert said, I am in Austin, Texas. I'm super excited to be here today. I've been in real estate for thirteen years. I currently serve as the VP of corporate operations implementation for LPT, and I love what I do because I get to work with team leaders across the country. My husband and I built a large real estate team in Texas that he now runs. His name is Bobby Moats. He's probably on here. So let's go ahead and jump on and get started. Let me share my screen with y'all. Alright. If I can get, like, a thumbs up, do y'all see my screen? Alright. Looks like we can see it. Awesome. Okay. So today, we're going to be talking about technology and productivity for teams. And really when when we talk about teams, I really want to start with the foundation of a real estate business. And when we think about that, I call these our eight pillars of a real estate business. It starts with client experience. How do your clients feel when they interact with your business all the way from your first contact with them all the way to closing, and why they continue to refer friends and family to you even post closing. Culture and retention, what keeps your agent showing up engaged and loyal? Efficiencies, I think of efficiencies as technology and operations working together to make your business stronger to save you time and get results. We have lead generation. This one's pretty obvious. We all know that this is how we bring business in. Development and training. When you're when you're bringing in agents onto your team, it's part of your job, part of your value proposition to them to grow their skills and help them get the confidence that they need to move their business forward. Marketing and branding, this is your team's public image and the storytelling behind who you are and how you do what you do. Profitability is the most important thing in our business. As David Lewis would say, we are not nonprofits. We are not here to volunteer, and so it's incredibly important that we're we this is a pillar of our business, and we pay attention to it. And lastly, we have recruiting. You know, the turnover in a real estate team, unfortunately, is pretty high. We know that a lot of agents come in and out. It's the nature of the business, and so we wanna make sure that we're never taking our foot off that pedal of recruiting. And so whether you're building a team right now or maybe rebuilding a team in this challenging market, we know that what you're facing belongs in these pillars. And these are really the core, ways that you deliver value to your agents. So as a business owner, you created a value proposition, which on paper is just words. Right? It's simply what I'm going to give you in exchange for being a part of my team, right, and giving me a part of your commission. So you might have really good intentions of delivering that value, but unless you actually execute on the foundation of your business to build those systems and processes to deliver that value, it's just that. It's just words. So we we wanna remember that the value exchange between the agent and the team owner, they're not just joining your team because they, you know, you need help. They're joining your team because they believe that you can help them and give them more confidence and help them sell more homes, which you can. Today, we're gonna focus on these three pillars, efficiencies, technology, and operations, lead generation, and recruiting. When you combine all of these with technology, you're not just growing your team. You're really multiplying the results that you can get out of what you're building. So like I said, efficiency equals technology and operations. When we do this together, you can handle more leads. There's not as many fire drills. You can get agents into production systematically quicker and ultimately close more deals. The operations of a business is is really truly just the adoption of the technology. Are you actually this is the key. Okay? Are you actually taking the technology that you've purchased, that you've spent your hard earned money for, and spending the time to adopt it into your business? To build out the operational structure behind okay. We have this new technology, whether it is a CRM, whether it is, transaction management software, how do you actually pause to fully adopt it so that you could take advantage of it? It it might be a yes. It might be a no. But what I do know is that when we're disorganized and we don't take the time to adopt, we lose opportunities, whether it's leads that we're losing because we're not paying attention to them in the CRM. Sometimes it's frustrated agents. I mean, we unfortunately, on our team, I know several times that we incorporated new technologies. We would make this big splash. Hey. This is gonna change our life. This is gonna change our team and the way that we do business. It's gonna make it easier for you and better and better for our clients. And then it falls flat because we just didn't take the time to adopt it, which led to frustrated agents, which caused issues with retention, not to mention the wasted resources, the money that we spent, the time and energy that we spent. You know, I really believe that teams don't fail because we lack talent. I think that we fail a lot of times simply because we lack the infrastructure. So I wanna talk about the modern business tech stack for a real estate team. You're all probably familiar with these items. We have the CRM. This is where all of your leads go, all of your connections go. Hopefully, they're being tagged and routed and followed up with so that you can stay top of mind with them. And a lot of CRMs make this really easy. When I started thirteen years ago, all we had was an Excel spreadsheet where I kept all of my leads and, you know, a notebook that I traveled with open houses. Prospecting tools, this is anything that is going to help your agents generate more conversations. Transaction management, look at this as not only the management of the paperwork of the contract and all of the addendums that go with it, but also the process that the client experiences. Just like we want to deliver value to our agents through their life cycle, we want to do the same for our clients as well because that's how we generate those repeat and referral clients. So how do we systematically deliver consistent value to clients? That's really what that transaction management software is for. Communication, no one ever said communicate less, so these tool tools help us keep up with each other. Onboarding and training, I'm seeing a lot of really successful teams have some sort of, LMS, a learning management system where they've built out virtual trainings that agents who join their team check off, they go through, and they can go back and reference when there's questions or challenges that they face. And it gives leverage to that team leader so they're not always the one training or answering those questions. It reduces that burden. We have marketing. So templates and branded materials that's going to help promote our listings and make our agents look really, really professional. Branding, how do we consistently message and give a visual representation of our business across all platforms so that we're building up that trust and credibility? So when the conversation does happen, they're already familiar with us. They already probably trust us and think that we're credible. And then lastly, recruitment tools. What are we using to help us find those agents that are the right fit for our team? I've seen teams use as many as twenty seven different technologies, and, honestly, I don't think that their p and l looked very good. I think that, it's very hard to take technologies from across the board and kind of cobble them together to run your business. And I believe that building a business is really just taking all of those pieces and using them strategically to get a result. Right? The key is staying on top of adoption of all of those technologies and getting rid of the ones that you are not using or aren't working for your business. Let's take a look at an audit really quick because I bet several of you team owners need to do this. I want you to download your bank statements, your credit card statements. I want you to print them off. Do not put them in Excel. Okay? It doesn't work. It's not the same. There is something about the highlighting that really makes it just very obvious as to what's going on. So download everything and get your highlighters. You need a green, a yellow, and a red. And, honestly, I believe that this is an exercise that you should be doing every quarter as a team owner and saying, what do we need to cut? How can I cut ten percent? So which tools are redundant? We have multiple ways of communication. Is there a free way that we can use to communicate with each other as opposed to paying for a technology? Which tools are we underutilizing? They're really powerful, but we just didn't take the time to really train our agents on them. We haven't adopted them operationally yet. How can we get those either off the the p and l or into the business? Which tools are really do it yourself when they really should be done for you? Right? How can we hold accountable those vendors to really helping us with that adoption? And then what's costing you more time than saving me money? So you're gonna highlight each of your expenses, green, yellow, or red. Green means keep. We're using it. It's giving me an ROI. Yellow means I may not know what that expense is, and I need to look into that and evaluate it to see if we need it, or I need to cut it. I think a lot of our teams can find a lot of efficiency by doing this exercise. Okay. So let's switch over to our other two pillars that we're gonna focus on today. And when we think about what's most important right now, it's how can we grow our team. I believe there are really only two ways to grow a team, either agent count or unit count, and and often they go hand in hand. So agent count, of course, is recruiting and retention. Unit count is driven by lead generation. Let's visit agent count first. There are lots of different resources out there for you to grow your agent count. The most important one is the one that you actually use. So we know that our biggest lever for growth is going to be agent count. You can have all of the leads in the world, and if you do not have the agents to take on that business, doesn't matter. Wasted money, wasted effort, wasted energy. So we have AM cards. We're gonna go through each of these, which is a communication tool for agents and clients. We have corded. Io that's gonna help us identify agents that might be ready to move. We have done for you attraction and follow-up systems. This is a little teaser for what's coming for our Team Growth Plus, members. And then we also have agent attraction events. So for those of you not familiar with Corded, this is just a little snapshot of what it looks like. You can see that here I've I've blanked out the names, but you can search agents in your market by different filters. Maybe you're looking for an agent that has done a certain number of production, or maybe they haven't closed a deal in a certain amount of time. Maybe they're in a specific location. You have amazing search capabilities within this platform. What's even better is that you can actually look at all of these recruiting tools and go into Corded, which is an example of one recruiting tool, and it will give you options recommendations for who to contact today. So I opened my corded this morning. This was my list. Right? These are identified as agents that might have a probability of moving to another brokerage. So I know these are the people I'm gonna pick up the phone and call today, or I'm going to invite them to my event, or I'm going to send them a card. Right? How can we build relationships with this targeted list so that when the time comes for them to make a decision on where they wanna be, they think about contacting us. Right? They have that relationship. We've built that trust with them. We've shown them that value, and they're thinking, okay. Well, I probably need to have a conversation with Shana because I really like her and, you know, I trust her opinion. And so, you know, maybe let me just talk about where I should go or what my next step should be. I think I wanna go back to this slide really quickly. I just wanna show Chorded is using a lot of AI. I know that's a really hot topic right now in real estate. This is one of the platforms that is using AI at a really high level to help us work smarter and not harder. So it eliminates a lot of the guesswork and helps us focus our efforts, on on specifically what we need to be doing. So just like we focus on our hottest clients to contact or or potential clients, I should say, or nurtures, these are innate agent nurtures. How can we slowly nurture them across the line to our team? Okay. Another really cool feature of Corded is that it can help you with retention. You know, when you are a small team, maybe four to five agents, you really have this family feel. It's really easy to stay in contact with each other. You're probably going out on, like, team dinners. You're on a text thread. It really feels like a little family, and it's super easy to build relationships and maintain those relationships when you're in that small team. When you get larger and you start scaling your agent count, it gets a lot harder to maintain that relationship and build that relationship with all of the agents on your team. And we all know that retention starts and ends with relationships. So what I love, and this is also encoded, is that you can look at your team, the agents on your team, and see their recent accomplishments. It's looking at, hey. This was their first listing at LPT, or this was their first closing at LPT, or this was the highest listing of their career, their their highest closed sale, their first listing in ninety days. You know, maybe they've had a lull in their sales, but they're right back in it and they've got their first listing now, or they're leading the market. They're performing higher and better than others compared to the market. This is how you're able to identify the agents that you should reach out to and give that little touch and say, hey. You are doing an amazing job. I just saw that you had your first listing at LPT. I wanted to congratulate you. I know that took a lot of hard work. I appreciate how much you're taking care of our clients. You've been such an amazing addition to our team, and I'm really happy that you're here. It's that simple. Right? Another option for you is to send them a card, and AMcards is a great solution for that. There are templates in there that allow you to edit and customize the message that you wanna send. And so, these are some templates for our Teen Growth Plus, members, but there's a ton of templates in there that are so simple to set up. And in three minutes, I can send them a handwritten card to their mailbox, which is so meaningful. We all know how important getting handwritten mail is. It's it's really, my nine year old daughter, she loves handwritten mail. She wants to go to the mailbox every single day, and she has a little friend that she sends mail back and forth to, and nothing makes her happier than getting that. I kind of feel the same way as an adult. Like, when I get a birthday card, it makes it me feel really special. So acknowledging and recognizing agents in this way is a really amazing step towards retention. It all just starts with helping making them feel seen. Right? The next opportunity for growing your agent count is agent attraction events. And here, if you scan this QR code, I've given you a little snippet of a how to throw an agent recruiting event, and it also gives you a planner for the twenty twenty five year, some sponsorship, like, how do I get sponsorship for my events? It gives you templates for that. I hope this is an amazing resource for you. We know that getting in front of people is the best way to make a connection with them. Agent attraction events are are really effective because they combine the visibility with the connection with them, and you're giving them value all in one setting. And so it allows you to build relationships at scale instead of that one to one, it's one to many. And so the effort and energy that you're putting into that event is just multiplied because you're not just talking or meeting with one person, you're potentially meeting with twenty or thirty, however many you get to show up because of the value that you're providing. And when they get to experience that environment with you and experience the culture of your team, right, you have your whole team there, your your leaders are introducing you, they're setting you up as the expert, they're working the room, they're making relationships with people too, they get to hear directly from you about whatever it is you're going to talk about, whether it's you know market trends of twenty twenty five or how to stand out online or, you know, how to be a social media pro. Whatever it is, you are now the expert in their mind. You've given them massive value. They trust you. They've They've gotten to see your team culture, how y'all interact with each other, and it really is an acceleration to your recruiting if you're able to get those agents in the room with you and with your team. They can see your systems. They can hear success stories. They can feel your energy. It all works towards helping you recruit easier in a better way. Okay. So we've talked a lot about agent attraction events. We've talked a lot about how to grow your agent count. Let's talk about how to grow your unit count. So we know that your unit count grows when your agents have the tools and support to convert more leads to closings. I had to throw motivation in there too when they have the motivation to as well. There are a lot of opportunities here. We're gonna focus on four of them. We have recruiting. No surprise there. We have cash offers, like, Zudelio is an option. We have LPT power packs. We're really gonna go into that one. And we have events. Just like we have recruiting events, we have client events. All of these all of these different opportunities can create consistency without the burnout. Right? We're being more productive without burning out. So like I said before, agent count equals unit count. We know that a team grows when an agent count goes up. Right? We know that that's related. We were not gonna spend a whole lot of time on this again. I do wanna spend time on power packs, and I have a little bit of bone to pick with all of y'all. For some reason, all of the team leaders really like to reinvent the wheel. We just do sometimes. Let's stop doing that. We have these proven amazing opportunities to give our agents resources, whether it's the power pack or the open house kit or the buyer pack. We can help them show up in a professional way and get more wins without putting more work on our plates. Right? Why wouldn't we adopt that? Why wouldn't we say, okay. Pause. I really need to go research the open house power pack. I need to look at it. How can our agents use this in the most productive way possible at our open houses? How can we get more business out of this? What operationally do we need to support in order to make this happen? Right? Isn't that worth it? I don't know why we wouldn't do that. It also gives us an edge when we're attracting talent. This is something that they can't get anywhere else. They can't get this outside of LPT. So that attraction makes our recruiting so much easier. So I hope we're now at a place where we can all agree. We're going to stop reinventing the wheel, and we're going to use the resources that we already have. We have another we have enough tasks. We have enough problems and challenges in our businesses. We don't need to create more. So if you need more direction on what is available for your team to use, make sure you're attending our three PM sessions for the rest of the next two weeks. Go into connect. Look at the marketing tab. There's lots of opportunity there for you to create efficiencies in your business without you having to take on the extra burden of it. Cash offers. So Zudilio is a great example. There are lots of cash offer platforms out there, but it really gives your agents an arsenal of tools to pull from depending on the situation. When I was in heavy production and I would go into a listing and they needed to sell quickly, back then, we didn't have this cash offer tool. I would have had to go to get some sort of funding and create some sort of iBuyer model to be able to go in and offer them a cash offer. It it it didn't work for our business. It was never possible for us to do this. The cash offer platforms make it super easy. It may not be the best option for everyone. That's okay. Your job is to educate them, give them the options, and help your agents close more deals by being able to offer those. I think cash offers are especially important for our now business. So we're all looking at the next, you know, what are we're in April. So the next eight months and saying, how can I get more closings in the next eight months for my team? We should be looking at now business. What is now business? That's expireds, FSBOs, open houses. Right? Those sellers or buyers that want to, make take action quickly. They really need certainty in their life or they need speed. So cash offers is an amazing call to action to get their attention and maybe provide them a solution that gets them where they wanna go more easily than going the traditional route. Client events. I started my business in twenty thirteen as a brand new agent, and my only lead gen mechanism was open houses. I sold fifty five homes my first year, and it was a grind because every Saturday and Sunday from one to four, I was doing an open house for two years. It took me that long to really build my database. Right? I skipped, family events. I did open houses on Mother's Day, all of these things, but it was worth it because I built my database, and I kept my business going and still goes to this day because of my database and most importantly my client events. So once a quarter, we would offer some item of value to our past clients or our referral partners. A lot of y'all are already familiar with this. It can become a burden if we don't have an operational process and technology behind it to help us move it forward. So, you know, we can set up a cadence where every quarter on the first month, we're deciding what is our event for the next quarter. On the second month, we're actually planning that event, and on the third month, we're beginning to market that event. That way, we always stay ahead of the game in that planning and that cadence of making sure those events and touches happen. I like at the end of the year, I my favorite thing is to look at next year and say, what are we gonna do? What are the fun things that we're gonna do each quarter? Some ideas. So a movie theater buyout, we did this one year. We showed the Grinch movie at Christmas. It was super fun. A night at the ballpark or maybe pictures in the park, you hire a photographer to take family photos. That was always a huge hit because then we would put our logo on the picture and put it on Facebook for everyone to see. It was an amazing success. Homeowner workshops, how do I upsize? How do I invest? How do I sell? Popeye parties, so you know at Thanksgiving, can you do a pie giveaway Or can you do a back to school donation drive? Or holiday photo days? Or local seminars? What's interesting to the local market, and how can you provide information on that? These are really important when it comes to generating business from your database, from people that already know you. Right? I will say that I think that the biggest mistake team leaders make with events is that they do not put enough importance around the communication of the event. The event itself is great, but I don't necessarily care if my clients show up to the event. That's not the important part. The important part is the communication before and the communication after. So before, I'm offering value to them. I'm saying, hey. June twenty first is the first day of summer. We love to celebrate by giving all of our clients free ice cream. If you'd like free ice cream, please join us at DCBY on one two three Main Street on this date this time. Right? I'm communicating that via text, via email. I'm putting it in our Facebook group. I'm communicating in multiple places, and I'm touching every single past client at least two or three times. Then what I do, we host the event. We have the event. Whoever shows up shows up. I'm happy to see them, Make great conversation, relationships with them. After the event, anyone that didn't show up, I'm calling and I'm saying, hey. I I you weren't able to make the event. I just wanted to say, I'm really grateful for you. I'm sad you didn't make it. Next quarter, we're gonna do this. I hope to see you there. Such an easy touch. A lot of our agents are scared to pick up the phones and make that call. The events, the pre communication, and the post communication gives them such an easy reason to do it. It's it's a softball, total softball and really easy. Okay. I know we've covered a ton of ground. I think that, if there's anything to take away from all of this, we really want to make sure that we're building a scalable business. Right? Whatever business you decide to grow or shift into, let's be intentional about it. Let's think about it because if you don't if you don't strategically move into that, that growth is going to choose for you. We wanna make sure that, we're being smart. Right? We're leaning into systems, into automation and support. If you're not sure where to start, jump on connect. Connect with me. I'd love to to meet you and chat with you and answer any questions that you have. Another opportunity is to look at TeamGrowth Plus. It's an amazing community of team leaders from across the US that are interested in growth. We all grow in a very different way. We all have different team structures and businesses, but we're learning from each other. It's really there are a lot of tech options there. Right? We have we offer a lot of platforms that you get to, be a part of that Robert has selected especially for this group, but the most important part is the community. We have bimonthly masterminds with Robert, which the nuggets, you wouldn't believe it. I just it's mind blowing sometimes. He'll also bring in some industry leaders that we learned a lot from too. It's been an amazing community of leaders that are really passionate about growing their real estate team. We're actually having our first in person mastermind in May, and I'm really excited to meet all of you in person and see you there if you're a part of the community. If not, you can learn more. Tracy just, put an email in the chat. You can learn more about it there. Before we wrap up, if you have any questions or ahas that you'd like to share, let's put them in the chat. What do y'all what do y'all think about this? This is really interesting that, I can't see any of you. I can't see your faces. I wish I could see your faces. Right. Thank you. I'm glad that this was valuable to you. This recording will be available in Connect if you need to go back and revisit it. I'm also going to post that, event agent attraction event workbook for you to use, and I hope y'all are taking advantage of this marathon. There's so much valuable content and a lot of really fun prizes too. I wish I could win some of them, but, you know, that's not allowed, unfortunately. Alright. Well, I'm so glad that y'all have enjoyed this. It's been a pleasure to be with each of you today. I can't wait to see you next week. I'll be teaching on open houses and how I built my business with only open houses. So, hopefully, you'll be able to join that next week.