Wanna start it? You did. Yep. I got it started. Hey, everybody. We're gonna, like, give Zoom a minute to load everybody in here, and then I'll get us kicked off. I do not have Matt Hodge to DJ, so we don't have any music. You guys will have to just suffer through No. Me and Matt Miale here. But, we'll give this a minute to load everybody in. Tracy, you got any music over there? Oh, Ron Collier is gonna sing for us. We're we're we're good to go. I was actually I was I was recently, a guest on a a podcast, and they asked me what my entrance song was. And I and I I did go with a Grateful Dead song. Okay. So I and the one and only, which again, I don't know, Robert, if you'll know this. Tracy, of course, will and obviously, Matt Levy would, but I I did go with the one and only top ten Grateful Dead song ever, which if anybody knows what that song is, you should put it in the chat. That is extra points for sure. If you know the one and only Grateful Dead song ever released that made it to the top ten out of a out of, you know, hundreds and hundreds of songs and albums, decades of of producing records. So we'll see if anybody here knows what that is. Christina goes, I've got here. She's like, grateful grateful who? Grateful dead. Yeah. Alright. Well, I'll leave that question out there for bonus points for somebody. Did you hear it, the music or not? Nah. Your Zoom is is, like, filtering it out. You gotta change your settings. There you go. Final guesses it was ripple. It was not ripple, though, Ronald. Thanks for the good guess. Quality guess. Touch of gray. There we go. So let let's see who got it first. Everybody's chiming in now. They got it. Rose got it. Ronald, you You got it. Rose winners. That's correct. It was the one the one and only top ten Grateful Dead hit ever, to make it to make it to the billboard top ten, out of all the songs that they produced over decades and decades and being, the number one product producing touring band for year after year after year all through the seventies and eighties, they still never really had top ten hits, which is pretty wild. So Yes. Alright. Well, we've got about a hundred folks loaded in. We're three zero four, so we're gonna get kicked off here as we continue on in our Ascend Spring marathon. Today's class, we have Matt Miale joining us, someone I've gotten in over the last, you know, probably four or five months now. Runs an amazing team up in Connecticut, really does a lot of events based marketing, events based, energizing of his team, events based recruiting for his team. And it's something we've been focusing on a lot inside of our Team Growth Plus, masterminds inside of LPT, growth you know, team growth plus. We wanted to bring that in as a part of the Ascend Marathon. So Matt's got a great presentation today, to talk you through how teams can grow, how teams can attract agents to their team, and really have success through events. So with that, Matt, I'm gonna turn it over to you, and, everybody's in for a treat here. This is somebody I'm a really big fan of. I feel like every time we get in a room together, I learn something new. I walk away with some really valuable nuggets. So get those notepads out, and buckle up for the one and only Matt Miali. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate it very much. But, also, just really wanna thank you for having me on today. Super passionate about the topic. And I'm gonna kinda walk you guys through over the next, you know, thirty, forty minutes, a little bit of how how the team came to be. But first, a little background just to give you some credibility. Our team in Connecticut very consistently in the top three production real estate teams here in the state. We do run a statewide organization. We're about twenty five full time agents. Over the course of the last three years, our high watermark in twenty twenty two was five hundred and eighty seven closed transactions. Like a lot of people, twenty twenty three, we took a little bit of a dip. We closed just under five hundred. Last year, we did four hundred and eighty. This year, pacing to get back over five hundred, so fingers crossed. All things going well. Winning in this market really feels like winning. But the cool thing about running a team like that that a lot of people get, really interested in learning about, which is really the key to what we're gonna talk about today, is that eighty percent of our business, eighty percent of those transactions come from sphere, repeat, and and referral business. So what that means is that as an organization, we are very, very focused on the people we already know. Most of our marketing, most of our effort to run this this big machine where the average agent on our team is closing twenty or more transactions is coming from our database. It's coming from the people that we're already in relationship with. And the the way that that came to be was was, I would say, kind of by accident in that I, like a lot of people, started my real estate business, out off the traditional model of, you know, go and meet whoever you can at open houses or wherever you can find them. And as the team grew, I bought a lot of Internet leads. I did a lot. I tried just about every other, you know, mechanism to get the phone to ring and found, found a lot of people were, you know, pretty a certain number of people were pretty good at converting leads, but like a lot of agents, and I understand this is really for, you know, a a group for for team leads. A lot of agents didn't do the follow-up as consistently as they needed to in order to get the conversion. And one day, I was, I was just thinking about something that I had learned around conversion and how difficult it is to convert complete strangers into a transaction versus convert people that you already know. And it just seemed like it was a no brainer. It feel it felt like suddenly I knew the best kept secret in real estate, which was if you could just get all the people you know in one place that you had a really high probability of finding opportunities. So I started to lean into this idea that the people I know were the best source for future opportunities. But the problem was, if you know a lot of people, how do you get around to talking to them all at the same time? And this is where events sort of culminated for me. So I'm gonna open up our slide deck here. Now there's a couple of different ways we're gonna talk about this today. One of them is we're gonna talk about how we use events in our business as our primary marketing methodology in order to go get new customers and keep in communication with the people that we already know, love, and trust. The second thing that we're gonna talk about is how I've leveraged events in the last year and a half to create a real magnetic attraction to the team for agents who who've decided to join us. So the whole topic here, of course, is using events as leverage in your business. So the first thing that I think is really important to point out, events are fun. So so, like, if you can decide what you wanna do every day, if your job and and the job of most real estate agents is to wake up and go to parties and meet new friends, here's the reality. The reality is that most real estate agents fit that behavior profile far more than they fit the behavior profile of someone that's gonna sit in a cold, dark room with a swinging light bulb over their head and a dripping, you know, drip of water, and just hammer the phones all day. And when I realized that as I started building a team that the audience of people that I would be serving for events would be far more inclined to do the job, to talk to more people, to engage the world if they were talking about fun things versus the canned sales script of who do you know that's looking to buy, sell, or invest in real estate that I would have a far more fun way to engage the business. And so events for the agents on your team are a really it's like a it's like the ultimate hack to get people on the phone, to get them talking to people, and to go find new opportunities. Now as a team owner, you use events because they're a really simple way to create a cadence around how how to move your team forward every day. So how many of you as team owners and go ahead and put it in the chat if this resonates with you. How many of you as team owners struggle from time to time with getting my cut getting your agents to get into the office and make phone calls every day? How many of you have ever experienced that? Yeah. Everybody. Right? Like, you know that if you said, hey. Tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, why don't you guys all meet me in the office, and we're gonna cold call for two or three hours. And then that morning, people just can't make it. Right? Their car breaks down. They have, you know, the flat tire that morning. Somebody's gotta get brought brought to school. Nobody loves it. But what if you gave every agent on your team thirty tickets to a fun event and you said, hey. The job today is get rid of these tickets as fast as you can. Suddenly, that profile of the of the agent that's on your team who is likely the person that's most likely to engage in their community is gonna be pretty excited. They have something fun to call people about. And the key is that you never have to tell them to mention real estate. They never have to talk about real estate. They just get to call the people they know, love, and trust. Now what happens for the customers, for the people that you serve, the people that are in your world when they get a call consistently from an agent on your team or from you? And that call is never about, hey. I wanna sell you something, or I think that you should know something about some, you know, about the impact of tariffs on the economy. But instead, it's, hey. I I have four tickets to a game this Friday, and I thought of you. Would you be interested in taking those tickets? Do you and your family, would you guys like to go and see a minor league baseball game this weekend? Would you and your family like to go to a food truck event that we're hosting? Would you and your family like to go to, an ice cream event that we're hosting? The the answer is always one of two things. It's either, wow. Thank you so much. We can't make it. Or, wow. That sounds amazing. But it's never, why did you call me again? So the events are like the ultimate hack to having communication and conversation with people, that you need to be talking to, which are the people that you already know, love, and trust. So how did it start for me? So it started for me, like I said, I figured out this thing that that if I could just talk to more people consistently, I would have a bigger opportunity to build a bigger business. Now a couple of interesting things happen. One is that, as my business started to get get big as a solo agent, this is two thousand ten, two thousand eleven. I was like a lot of solo agents. I was hustling. I was doing I was having a lot of success, but there was no way that I was doing the work that need to be done every day and keeping in touch with everybody. And one night after a softball game, I was sitting in a bar, which happened frequently after softball games, and I was talking to a friend of mine. And this happened to be a new bar that had opened up in our town, And there were eighty six different craft beers on tap. And my buddy and I were sitting there, and we we had been in this bar a couple of times, and he said, you know, the only thing that sucks about eighty six beers on tap is you just never can try them all. And I thought to myself, he's right because, you know, you'd be dead. But aside from that, you never get through them all. But what if you could? But what if what if you had a beer tasting at that at that bar in town? And what if I invited all my friends and all my customers to come and try out the eighty six beers? And what if the bar could be my partner in that because they would get a whole bunch of business to come in? And what if we could do a huge promotion around a beer tasting? Number one thing about this was it was super authentic to me. Now this is important to to realize that as you think about events for your business, for your team, it has to be an authentic experience to you. Meaning, if I had decided to do an event, but instead of it being a beer tasting, I came out of the gates with a five k or a ten k, that would not have landed as well with my audience. The people that I did business with like to drink beer and go to bars. Those are my people, but I wasn't really a runner. That's not what that wasn't my world, but somebody who was a runner and was authentic to that would be a fantastic candidate to bring a five k to their local town. And so as I started to think through, what if I did a beer tasting? I could get eighty or a hundred people to come into this bar, and I could spend twenty five to thirty dollars for each of them, and I could knock out all those conversations at once. So initially, that was how it started. I thought to myself, this is like the ultimate way for me to get all this conversation happening all at once, get everybody in one room, and and have a massive impact on my business. Now I was terrified because that when it came down to budgeting for this event, what I found out was it was gonna cost me about eight thousand dollars. And for a lot of you and a lot of teams and especially for myself when I was starting, eight thousand dollars was a lot of money. That was the difference between me being able to pay my mortgage the next month or not. Right? So, so I was nervous, but I took the risk, and I decided I was gonna go for it. And wouldn't you know that on the night of the beer tasting, three people walked in, three, out of about a hundred, walked over to me and said, Matt, I hope it's okay. I brought my friend with me. They wanna put their house on the market, and I knew that I needed to introduce you, and I thought what better way than to bring them to your party. Three clients came out of that event that first time, and I thought, shit, I might be on to something. I might actually have something going on here. What if I did this more? What if I got more people in the room? Now, here's what our calendar of events looks like now. So you can tell when you look at this what it feels like to be on the Meeale team. We are a loaded for events team. Every single week, we got stuff going on. We are constantly in the pace and cadence of bringing opportunities to our agents and our sphere database, all the people that we know so that people always have something to talk to their sphere about. Now the the other piece of this that's really important to understand, and I'm gonna share a story. This just happened to me. This literally just happened to me. I remember learning that the ratio of conversion for people that you know, if you already have a relationship with them and turning those people into a potential opportunity is twelve to two. Now I remember that thinking about that and saying, so for every twelve people that I know and that I communicate with in an effective way, value. For every twelve people, there are two people there are two opportunities in there. And the way they break that down is they said that there's one opportunity that is one of those twelve people needs to buy, sell, or invest in real estate, and that one of those people knows somebody who needs to buy, sell, or invest in real estate. So what that means is that for every twelve people that you invite to an event or get to show up, there's two opportunities there. Your job then only becomes to figure out which two. Now ironically, and I swear this just happened, about eight weeks ago, I was invited to a dinner, and it's this new group that's shown up in our market. It's called dads in business. It's all it's all guys who who have kids, who run businesses, entrepreneurs. It's a really cool group. The group's gotten a lot of traction, and I got invited to a dinner, which was effectively different different people from different businesses or general contractor there, and I was invited as a, you know, a leader in the real estate space. I got invited to this dinner. There were twelve people there. I didn't know any of them. Didn't know any of them. But, of course, I went to the dinner. I thought it would be a great opportunity to network in our community. And wouldn't you know it that out of that dinner, I met one guy who's already under contract to buy a house, and I have one guy whose house is gonna be going on the market in the next thirty days. Out of twelve people, there were two in the room who were gonna buy or sell or invest in real estate sometime in the near future, and it just validates that when you can be handshake to handshake, belly to belly with people, you're gonna create a lot more relationship driven business opportunities than you are if you're sitting behind the phone. So this is what our calendar looks like now. So what we do consistently is create opportunities for our agents to invite people to events and for our and for the people that are in our world to say, yes. I'd like to get in the circus tent with you. So this is what it looks like today. Now for some of you, you look at that and go, man, dude, that's way overwhelming. How in the hell am I ever gonna create a calendar like that? Well, here's the simple thing. I broke this down into the four different types of events that we do, and each of these events has a different purpose. So I'm gonna cover these four events, and I want you guys to take notes. I want you to think about what these four events are and where you can start to leverage these ideas. Now the VIP event is what most people think of when they think of an event. They think of, I'm gonna rent out a space. I'm gonna do something. It's gonna be something that's really, really special that people are gonna get invited to, and they're just gonna be blown away. I'm gonna buy them dinner and flowers, and it's gonna be, you know, something that just is is over the top. And, yes, that's effectively what VIP events are. The thing about VIP events though is that they're very expensive. And so they are a you know, that's a per head cost. And so you gotta be really conscious of what you're doing when you're doing a VIP event. Now the one that I did, the beer tasting, that's how we build it, and that would fall into that category of a VIP event. And that obviously worked out really well because we got three transactions at that very first deal out of that very first event. Now the thing to also understand about VIP events, which is important, is that the VIP event isn't necessarily about inviting VIPs. It's about the experience of the people who get there. So here's what I want you to think about. There might be a prospect in your world if you're gonna host a VIP event, somebody that you've been trying to get into a relationship with, somebody that you think you should be in a relationship with, somebody that isn't referring business to you but should, maybe they're not a current client, but they're a friend. The VIP experience is about how they feel when they're there, not about who you invite. Events for you are actually the least important part of the event. The actual event, the hours in the space is the least important part. The most powerful thing you do with your events is invite people before and talk to people after. Because at the event, it's like a wedding. I mean, how many of you guys got married and felt like you didn't even talk to anybody that was there? The events are gonna feel the same way. Their work, While you're there, you're shaking hands and kissing babies. You're walking around. You're making sure everybody's you're the host with the most. Right? That's your job. But before the event, when you invite people and after the event, when you tell people you were so grateful they came or you reach out to the people who couldn't make it and say, hey. Sorry you couldn't make it. We missed you. That's where the relationship building happens. So VIP events, fantastic way to deepen relationships and get really deep with the right people. A fantastic way to convert people that ought to be in your sphere that don't that aren't yet, and you want to convert them. This is very, very important to note. The thing is they're expensive. So a lot of people struggle with how do I get a VIP event off the ground. I did see somebody in the chat mentioned sponsors, and I'll talk about that a little bit later, because sponsors can play a key role. But it is important that you play that out appropriately, and you can't If this is gonna be part of your marketing strategy, it's important not to rely exclusively on external dollars because at the end of the day, you're trying to do this to deepen relationship to their clients, not just to create a second revenue stream. So it the second type of event that you can that you can do, and this one is this one is one of my favorites when people say, Matt, how do I get started? Right now in your town or some town around you right now, there is already an event planned. It might be a five k. It might be a food truck event. It might be, you know, a dog dog walking, dog park event. It might be ice cream socials to celebrate spring. There's some event already happening in your town. Community events are a great way for you to show up in the community as a supporter of the community, but you then have to tie your presence at that to something. So here's a way that we do this. There is a taste of West Hartford event in the town that I'm in, which is in Central Connecticut and West Hartford, and they bring all the restaurants together. And what we do is we host an informal sweepstakes for gift cards to the participating restaurants, but you have to visit our tent and fill out our form that rates the restaurants based on what you've tasted. And then we publish our own results. So we use the community event to create a special event just for our people, and that creates exclusivity. It deepens the relationship with your customers, but it leverages something that you don't have to pay for. You just pay for the tent and some of the marketing, put up some some signage. Another one of our favorite ones is get is register to run with the Meeale team at any one of the five k events. I'm sure all of right now is five k season in New England because you can't get outside in the winter and run. So, you know, around here, everybody starts doing five k's. Right? And what you wanna do is you wanna be at the finish line of the five k and at the starting line, and you run a your team. You say the Miali team's running the five k. Join us for a free t shirt, and you send that out to your sphere and your database and all your runners that are just gonna run by themselves. They were just gonna run anyway. What they do is they sign up and they come and they meet you at the starting line and they get a free t shirt. And then at the end, you give them a, you know, a cracker or a banana or whatever the heck runners eat at the end of races. So you tie the community event to you, and so you're basically you're robbing the opportunity you're you're just you're just leveraging what's already happening to make it like it's your thing. One of the ways this also works, by the way here's here's a fun one that I like I like to do, and we've done this in the past too is whenever there's a giant event happening, that everybody's talking about so, we did this when Star Wars came out. If you remember, you know, there have been no Star Wars movies and for years and years, and then all of a sudden, Star Wars was back. And everybody was talking about Star Wars. Right? It was on the Today Show, and it was everywhere. But what we did is we went and we rented out a whole bunch of theaters for the Star Wars premiere. We paid for every ticket. And then what we did is give away those tickets for premiere night to go see Star Wars with the kids, with the family. Now what happens in your client's mind when you do that is you now become affiliated every time they see Star Wars. So Star Wars is already everywhere, and we did the same thing with Avengers. We did the same thing with Maverick when Maverick came out. You basically co opt a large event that's already happening, and you stick your brand next to it by being the source of opportunity for your clients. So whatever's already going on in your community, it could be you could do a movie. You could do a five k. You could do a, you know, an event that's already out there. You just basically co opt the big thing that everybody's talking about and say the way for you to participate in this is through me because I'm the guy that's gonna make this happen for you. You get a lot of attention that way. You get a whole bunch of, really grateful customers. And the beauty of it is you're not selling anything. You guys all know this because you're running teams. The thing that you constantly hear from your agents is, I don't wanna be salesy. Well, you don't have to be salesy to be fantastic at sales. You have to be in relationship. And so these are this this is just another way to deepen that. So our the next one I wanna talk about is giveaways. Now giveaways are an event that exists in isolation of humans. This is the best kind of event. This one, everybody can run. A giveaway is the one we're running right now. What we've done is we've gone and made a bunch of reservations and bought a bunch of gift cards at a bunch of restaurants that are totally sold out for Mother's Day. And then we create a QR code and a registration page, and we we post it and we boost it and we give it to we give our agents a, a QR code and a and a text message that they can send out that's fully curated and ready to go that just says, hey. I was thinking about you. We have reservations at ten restaurants in town, and we're gonna be running a sweepstakes two days before Mother's Day. If you haven't gotten your reservations yet, register here, and you could win a Mother's Day brunch on us. Now this is, again, super easy. It's a simple way to engage. Our giveaways are as they are nothing more than fancy Google sheets, Google forms that people fill out. And at the bottom of the Google form, of course, there's a question, is there anybody that we should be talking to that has real estate needs? Because people love to sign up for free stuff. And then, of course, at the bottom, they love to tell you if they can help you because people like to help. So this is also giveaways are a really powerful source of potential leads, and potential opportunities to reach out to people. You can run giveaways. I mean, you can run these. You should run them six times a year and just run for two months. It's just an easy way for your agents to be constantly communicating with people they know. By the way, giveaways can also be really, really great things to bring to, rooms like maybe some of you were in a BNI group or maybe you're in a networking group or you're in a chamber of commerce. Giveaways are an awesome thing to talk about when you're in front of a room because you can you can instantly gain credibility and instantly give people opportunity to engage with you without asking them for anything. You're just saying, hey. We're running this giveaway. It'd be awesome if you guys wanna participate. Go ahead and fill out the form, and you'll be instantly enter entered to win. Wade asked if I'd be willing to share the Google form. Absolutely, Wade. I'll I'll put a link up, at the end of the webinar. And then lastly, the last thing that you can do is run educational events. Now educational events are, these are super powerful. The way you run these, you either do buyer, seminars or seller seminars. Now we did this for a really long time. We used to do a thing called the home brew, and we would go specifically to breweries, and we would rent out the brewery. And the idea was you got your first beer, and we would do beer and pizza, And it was a fifteen minute information session designed for people that wanted to enter the market at any given point in time. I would typically do about a fifteen minute intro. This is who we are. Thanks so much for coming. Basically, an open house style event that you market to your sphere. And you again, important to know, you're marketing this to people that you know. If you market these to, like, just broad audiences, you're gonna get a lot less traction. You're really marketing this to people that already know you, that they might not pick up the phone when you call, they might not text. But if you say, hey. If you're thinking about buying or selling soon, we're hosting a a market update seminar at this brewery. Your first beer and pizza is on us. They'll just show up. They'll register and show up. And when they show up, you now you you're back in relationship with them. You're just talking to them. And the way we would typically run these is we would have we would basically run them like, you know, if we got forty people there, I'd have eight or nine of the agents on the team, and I would do sort of an intro. And then we would have the agents basically work the room as people were there just going around and answering questions, you know, really keeping it very low key, low profile, not trying to drive people into a class. So when I call it educational events, it's important to understand what we're talking about. We're not actually sitting people down in a classroom setting. We're trying to create something fun and some way to engage with people to get them to to raise their hand and say, at this moment in time, I might be a prospect. So that's how we that's how we run them. So these are the four events. So if I go right back to this calendar, basically, everything that's that's on this calendar falls into the profile of one of those four events. This is this is basically how we run our entire schedule. Now some of you guys are sitting here thinking, okay, Matt. Awesome. But how how do I get started, and how does this work? Really important to understand. The biggest thing that you need to do is get is just start. You've gotta start with something. My recommendation is go to your town town hall and find out what events are going on. Figure out what you can piggyback off of in order to get started, and then invite everybody you know to participate in whatever your mini event is that's going along with your with your client event. The takeaway is it's your pace and cadence that will make this work more than the event itself. The event itself is really not important. The idea is that you're gonna have a thing that you're gonna it's like setting a flag in the ground out in the future. You're gonna set a flag, and you're gonna know the event is coming up, and it's in June. And everything that you do from now until June is gonna be about that event. You're gonna talk to everybody about it. You're gonna drive traffic to it. You're gonna invite people to it. You're gonna you're gonna invite vendors to it. You're gonna invite agents that you're trying to recruit to your team to it. You're gonna tell everybody about this event. The idea is that you're just giving yourself a pace and communication style that's not gonna burn you out looking for that next transaction. It's just gonna help you get deeper and deeper into more and more relationships as you go. And then once that event's done, you follow-up with everybody and thank everybody, and you post all over social media about what a giant success the event was and how grateful you are to have such an amazing group of people that support you. And then you put the next event on the calendar, and you do the exact same thing. Pace and cadence will save you when you want when you wanna build a sphere database driven business. The idea that the what a lot of teams do and what a lot of agents do is they set the event, and then they lead everything up to it, and then they're exhausted afterward, and they just say, thank god it's over. Somebody told me once I needed to do this, but I really didn't want to. The whole point is don't put too much effort around the one night. It's really just about being consistent over time and having events that consistently show up on your calendar. Alright. So educational events, classes, trainings, and masterminds. So I'm gonna quickly shift gears here, and I wanna talk to you about how we have successfully leveraged this exact same model to recruit agents to join our team and how we use this entire concept of being in relationship as opposed to being transactional in order to build the business that we currently have. So everything that we do on our team, we treat with the exact same formula as an event. So I never do something once. I never do something for a small audience if I can do it for a big audience. So for instance, this all started because when my team was in its early days, two thousand fourteen, two thousand fifteen, I would have agents that would come to me and ask me questions, and they would say, we really feel like we need training on this, or we need masterminding on this, or we need scripting on this, or we need practice around this particular thing. And I would say, awesome. Why don't we get together on Wednesday and let everybody know that I'll be talking about this particular thing? And so that Wednesday, a bunch of people would show up and we'd talk about it, and they'd be like, wow. This was amazing. I got so much value out of it. Thanks so much. And I realized, well, if I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna be engaging people, we ought to invite other people too. So I went to my local broker, and I said, how about I do these masterminds here, in the office? I'm doing them already for the team. We might as well just invite other people that wanna get the the value. I have no problem sharing, and I'd rather have more people in the room. It makes for a better mastermind. Well, the masterminds for us turned into, we wound up at at one point. This is pre COVID. We were running them monthly, and we had typically eighty to a hundred people in attendance, and we did did them every month. Every brokerage, across we we wound up not hosting our masterminds locally. We would do our at at our market center, which was Keller Williams. We would just do them at an off-site because we never wanted people to feel like they that they were coming to a recruiting event. And when people come and show up and you deliver tons of value consistently about how to improve in their business, what ultimately do they start asking? I wonder what it's like if I would be on that team. Because you're not recruiting them. You're just offering them tons of value through the process. And so we would do masterminds consistently. Now we do we do three trainings a week on our team, and we open those up to every everyone in our market, every brokerage. And we typically are getting between fifteen and twenty guests at every one of our trainings at one at every one of our classes. And we've just put the masterminds back on the calendar, so we're actually gonna be doing those again up here in Connecticut. So, I really wanna encourage those of you that are running teams and even those of you that are successful independent agents, don't be afraid to just get started. Just put a group in a room. The first masterminds we did, you know, they were just my team. And then then there were eight or twelve people, and then they became twenty, and then they became forty, and then fifty, and then eighty. They grew over time because number one, I always showed up to deliver a ton of value and make sure that the people that were there walked away with something. My goal when I did it was never to recruit an agent. I knew that the outcome could potentially turn into that. My goal, though, was to just help people that were in the room learn something. And I knew that if I was the source of good information and and knowledge for them that at some point in time, the question might come toward me where they would say, hey. I've learned a lot from you, and I think maybe I'd be interested in learning more about what it's like to be on your team. So I wanna encourage everybody here to just take that step. Get committed to running these things. There are already things. I don't know your businesses, but I know for sure there are things that you do exceptionally well. You wouldn't be here today on this training at this time if you weren't already in the top five percent in the industry. You're already making a commitment to your own personal growth. That is a monster separator between every other person that's out there that's doing this in a mediocre way versus those that are really winning. So take the risk, put a class on the calendar, put it out to people and say, I'm good at this, and I feel like I could help some other people. And I'm willing to I'm willing to share. Go do it because you're gonna get people that will show up. And then just do it over and over and over again and consistently, and you'll continue to grow. Alright. So I wanna talk a little bit about recruiting and and recruiting to your team. When you when you think about recruiting, I think there's a really important distinction between recruiting agents and recruiting production. Now you guys I mentioned it when I started this, when we started this webinar, that we do about five hundred units a year with about twenty five full time agents. It it doesn't take a math whiz to do the per agent production math on that. We have a very high per agent production on our team. And, obviously, our per agent production is a direct reflection of the fact that the agents on our team work with their sphere, and they work with people that they already know. We also make sure that we only invite people to join our team who are willing to play by the playbook that we run. Now I've just shared with you guys the main lead generation playbook that we run on our team. It is an events and sphere driven playbook. It's very act it's very heavy on activity, which requires that agents pick up the phone and call and talk to people and engage the world, but we don't we don't recruit agents on our team. We recruit production. We recruit units. Now if you haven't seen the movie Moneyball, I'd highly recommend it. I think Moneyball is the best analogy of how many of us running teams can really start to see a shift in the way our businesses operate and the way our profitability shows up for us, which is one of the main reasons we all ought to be in business. In that, you ought to be playing money ball and recruiting agents that are willing to run your your model and run your business the way your business is run, not just get agents who are in the business to figure it out along the way. So we play money ball on our team. Now I figured out that money ball for us feels like making sure that when you recruit an agent to your team, that you're actually recruiting somebody that's willing to run your place. And, what that means is that they need to be willing to show up and go to work. And as a team lead, I need to be willing to provide a tremendous amount of value to them. And so somebody that shows up to my team that's gonna say, yes, Matt. I'd like to be part of your organization. We need to make sure that we're running them through a program that identifies not only are they a good fit, but can they run our playbook? So we run a basically, a class driven training program, which is what what is we call it agent production academy. An agent production academy is basically an agent onboarding program where it's like basic training. It's like boot camp. It runs for ninety days. Every agent that is brought to our team as a candidate is expected to plug into our playbook. They are required to have four hundred full complete records in their database by the time they graduate. That isn't just contacts, by the way. That's sphere driven relationships. Those are people that they know. So they spend ninety days learning our playbook, getting mastery over how we operate as a team, and we pour mountains of value into them by making sure that when they by the way, to start Agent Production Academy, an agent does not need to join my team. We offer them the first two weeks of participation for free with no commitment. We simply say show up and see what it's like to be a part of a high performance real estate team. And if you can get a lot of value out of the first two weeks, you might decide that this is the right locker room for you. If you decide it's not, that's totally okay. No harm. We're gonna be running this class every sixty days. You can always come back. So we run this program every sixty days. Agent Production Academy is, has been a total game changer for us, which is, by the way, a byproduct of figuring out what is the most important thing when we bring an agent to our team. What's the one thing that you could do for an agent if they join your team for them to feel total value fast? We all know the answer. They need a full pipeline. By the end of by the end of their onboarding, they ought to have deals in the pipeline. Because an agent that has deals in the pipeline after ninety days is gonna feel really, really good about the decision they made. An agent that's still struggling after ninety days is gonna start to question whether or not they join the right team. So what what can we do in order to in order to get them right on board with exactly what they need to do? Well, we need to hold their hand really, really close from day one and make sure that they do exactly what they need to do in order to get success. Because if they commit to doing it and then we deliver on our promise of giving them events, giving them exactly what to say, making sure that their sphere is being communicated to with all of the value that we told them we can communicate to it with, and then their phone starts ringing and they start having better, deeper relationships with the people that they know, love, and trust, how happy are those people on your team? They're super happy. They love and that's that's part of the reason why we have, very high per agent production, and we also have really, industry we're we're we have fantastic, agent retention. So our our agents typically stay on our team for a really long time. Why? Because it's worth it. Because they get a ton of value by being a part of it. So we run every agent that's on our team through Agent Production Academy. Agent Production Academy is a selection and training process. It's not just a a class, and we actually do fail people out of the class because we figure out pretty quickly in the first ninety days they're probably not a good fit for our playbook. Just to put some credibility behind it, these are real numbers. In two thousand twenty four, we recruited fifty four agents to start Agent Production Academy. We graduated thirty, which means twenty four failed out or quit. Eighteen were retained. Now what we call retention is that they were on the team six months after they graduated, and they were on pace to close at least twenty units in a year. How many of you would be happy to add eighteen agents to your team that could close twenty units in a year? It was a game changer for us. I'll tell you that had we not instituted this, rolled out this program, and really drove it starting in twenty twenty three, we would have been in big trouble this year because we would not have had the players that could run the playbook that we needed in order to get to the numbers that we needed because the market's got a headwind, doesn't it? Absolutely. And we needed to figure out how to how to beat the headwind before we got there. Those eighteen agents in twenty twenty four produced eight hundred and thirty thousand dollars in GCI for our team. Those are valid, numbers. That's what we did. And twenty twenty five is shaping up to be far better. So far this year, we've already, through our first two sessions, put twenty five people through agent production academy. We have three more sessions left. So we target trying to get, about ten to twelve people to start every every class. So so all of this is to say that as a byproduct of running events, having trainings, having masterminds, really just providing value, we've built a program that is events driven, that gets people in deeper relationships. That's not about cold calling. I promise you, I don't sit on the phone and cold call. I don't cold call the recruit. I don't cold call to sell houses. I just focus on building deep relationships with as many people as I possibly can, possibly can, and I use events as the backbone for how we do it very consistently. So couple of things that I'm gonna summarize with. So number one, just remember, events are not just marketing. It's leverage for the agents, for your customers, and for you. Events give you a tool that you can use that that really solidifies your agents' relationships in your marketplace, in your community. I forgot to mention, and I do wanna I don't wanna gloss over this because it's kind of a big deal. We also tie charitable contributions to every one of our events. Last year, we donated, thirty thousand dollars to Connecticut Food Share, which is a local organization that supports food insecurity here in Connecticut. So every one of the events, we give our clients an opportunity to donate, and we do a matching program. So last year, we actually wrote a check for thirty thousand dollars, which was awesome. Feels good. Again, another opportunity for you to just contribute to your to your community. So, you gotta get started somewhere. Lastly, I wanted to offer, I am going to be hosting a podcast. If you guys got any value out of this at all, go ahead and scan, the QR code that's here. The podcast will be called Real Estate MD, and we're gonna be accepting applications. The the concept behind Real Estate MD is that we will be doing live coaching calls for any team lead or independent agent who wants some help in their business, help on their you know, help with anything that they're looking to do inside of their business, whether that's recruiting, growth, lead generation, whatever it is. We'll be we'll be recording live coaching calls, and, you'll be able to talk to one of our guest doctors, which are people that you know and myself, and, we'll be bringing you on as a guest. So go ahead and scan that if you're interested in being a guest on the podcast. And then lastly, if you got some value out of this, please go ahead and find me in all these places. You can find me on the socials. You can find me on Instagram, Miali Matthew. Friend me on Facebook, Matt Miali. Follow us on YouTube, etcetera. And if you go ahead and scan that, you can find all the spots where you might be able to get some additional value. We do post a lot of content out there, so, a lot of we give you we we put up live, our morning calls, which start every day at eight thirty. We put up, snippets from our morning calls so you can feel free to rip off whatever the heck I'm talking about on any given day. And, appreciate you guys having me here. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I like your question, Wade. Do I do housewarming events? I don't do housewarming events, not because I'm against it or too narrow, just never was a thing that I leaned into. Two of, two event strategies that I think would kill it if somebody wants to steal it. Number one, I I've been dying to do this. I don't know what kind of community you live in, but in the community that I'm in, there are block parties every spring and every fall. And I think that a realtor could dominate a marketplace by simply going and being the block party, sponsor. Simply going into a community and saying, I'm gonna host your block party this year. I'm gonna bring the food. I'm gonna call the fire department for the fire truck. I'm gonna get the bounce house. I think I think a block party sponsorship, event model would crush it. I also think a housewarming, model could be amazing. I've heard a lot of people that did that. I've I've heard of a lot of people that do that. It doesn't I think the only downside to that is that it you can't really do a housewarming party to your sphere. It winds up being to the sphere of the person that you've just sold the house to, which could be tremendous. You could get a lot of, potential new business there. But, ultimately, we're trying to deepen the relationships with the people we already know, like, and trust versus prospect for new ones. That's how we do our events. So, alright. Very good. Thank you, everybody. I hope there was a lot of value here, and, you go ahead and find me. You and if you have any other questions, go ahead and reach out anywhere, through any of the social media. I'm happy to get back to everybody. Thank you. Thank you.