Lessons in Building a Thriving Real Estate Team from The Odd Couple

When it comes to building a standout real estate team, few achieve it as effectively as Shane Montoya and Jason Koenig, co-owners of The Odd Couple team in St. Paul, Minnesota. With an impressive track record of closing 411 transactions and generating $150 million in volume in just one year, this dynamic duo has perfected the art of cultivating a thriving team and solidifying their community presence.

In Episode 32 of The OT (Only Teams) Podcast, Daren Phillipy dives into the strategies and insights that have propelled Shane and Jason’s success. Here are the key takeaways from their journey:

1. Establish a Culture of Production

Shane and Jason prioritize a work ethic rooted in productivity. Their agents are expected to be actively present—making phone calls, door knocking, hosting open houses, and generating leads consistently. This culture of accountability drives results and sets a high standard for their team’s performance.

2. Leverage Community Engagement

The Odd Couple team is deeply integrated into their local community through philanthropy and events. From annual coat and food drives to neighborhood gatherings like National Night Out, their efforts not only generate business but also build trust and loyalty. These initiatives ensure their brand resonates as a staple in their three-mile radius.

3. Craft Memorable Client Experiences

Client relationships are a cornerstone of their success. Quarterly appreciation events, personal touches like Jason’s home-cooked weekly team lunches, and community-focused celebrations strengthen their connection with clients and keep referrals flowing.

4. Empower Agents with Autonomy and Support

Shane and Jason’s complementary leadership dynamic allows them to focus on their strengths—Shane excelling in sales and lead generation, and Jason managing operations and marketing. This division of responsibilities provides agents with the resources and independence needed to excel, fostering a collaborative and empowered environment.

5. Selective Recruiting and Retention

Shane and Jason believe in quality over quantity when it comes to team members. They are highly selective, ensuring that new agents align with their culture. For retention, they offer competitive splits, administrative support, and a tailored approach to meet the needs of top producers. This commitment has resulted in long-term loyalty, with some agents staying for 5 to 14 years.

Key Strategies for Growth and Longevity

Lead Generation: Local advertising, branded community events, and leveraging tools like Boomtown for internet leads.
Community Presence: Hosting unique events like food truck gatherings and outdoor workouts to engage clients and attract new business.
Innovative Open Houses: Exclusive neighbor-only previews and weekday open houses for targeted demographics like 55+ communities.
Agent Collaboration: Senior agents are involved in decision-making, creating a sense of ownership and engagement within the team.

Final Thoughts

The Odd Couple team exemplifies how intentionality in culture, community, and client relationships can fuel sustained success. By creating a supportive, high-performing environment and embedding themselves within their community, Shane and Jason have established a team model that others in the industry aspire to emulate.

Catch the full conversation on Episode 32 of The OT Podcast to learn more about their inspiring journey and actionable strategies for team-building success.

Subscribe to The OT Podcast

For more insights from top-performing real estate teams, subscribe to The OT Podcast, leave a review, and join us every Tuesday at 12 Noon PST for the live mastermind. Let’s grow together!

Transcription

Announcer 00:00

Welcome to the OT only teams in real estate,

Shane Montoya 00:15

first and foremost, really tries to have a culture of production. So we are pretty insistent that our agents and we let them know the expectation whenever we bring on a new agent that we really are, we expect to see them in the office, making phone calls, doing production, having plans to door knock, doing open houses and so on and so forth. I when our our internal mission is to be a household name in real estate within a three mile radius of our office, and we just do that by being relevant. You have always said five miles, but that puts us in like you put it at five. It’s three. It’s always been three that you’d always see five in that this was like in North Minneapolis.

01:09

We have our Tuesday meetings after every Tuesday meeting, I make a home cooked lunch for the team. We eat together in the summers, we grill in the backyard.

Announcer 01:22

I here’s your host, Daren Phillipy.

Daren Phillipy 01:28

Everybody welcome this week’s ot only team for real estate agents. My name is Daren Phillipy and I’m your host. And go ahead, just start sending the thank you emails for this episode, because you guys are gonna love this. I reached out to Shang of The Odd Couple team from St Paul, Minnesota, and him and his partner Jason, run a massive team of 411 sides and $150 million in volume, they are an amazing example of building a team of culture. Check this out. Well, I don’t even want to ruin all the secrets, but you’re going to hear some amazing culture tips and ideas to get a team together and to retain those agents, number one, you’re going to hear a ton of that stuff. You’re also going to hear some magic on how to really own a community. They they move their their their office outside of their brokerage, into their own separate location, and have just poured into this community and well, pretty much they own the place. Now can, can I ask you guys a favor? Um, I’ve been this. This is episode 32 and I’ve got a whole bunch more already recorded that are going to be coming your way. So don’t worry. You got some great stuff coming. But one of the things that I’ve never asked you guys to do is, well, I don’t know if I’ve asked you to do anything other than come to the class or come to the zoom, but I’m going to ask you to do something else. If you’re listening to this on iTunes, I want you to follow me. Follow this podcast. If it’s on iTunes, if it’s on Spotify, wherever you’re listening, just click subscribe. That’s all. Now, if it’s on iTunes, I want you to leave a review. Leave a review. Put five stars. If you don’t think it’s five stars, fine, don’t put anything. I’m really, really only looking for five stars. Now, if you’re watching this on YouTube, I need you to subscribe, click subscribe on YouTube and then leave a comment. I want to see that kind of stuff, like this stuff, guys this. This is great content. We have great people on the OT already, and we’ve got a lot more coming in in the future. And I want you guys to just help me out a little bit and make sure that I can get a little bit more traction when it comes to this online stuff. So that’s pretty much it. The other thing is, I want you to be in the room. So just remember, go to only for teams com. Click that little button that says, join the Zoom Room when it’s noon Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday. And that’s pretty much it. So every Tuesday, noon Pacific Standard Time, jump in the Zoom Room. I’ll see you guys. And okay, I’m done talking. Listen to these guys. They’re awesome. I will see you guys at the end of the OT. Alright guys, welcome to the OT. So, so excited to have Shane and Jason from The Odd Couple team. I what I called them up. I said I can’t wait to talk to you guys. There’s lots of great producers in Minnesota, but not the greatest that have the greatest name, too. And so Shane and Jason, thanks for being on the OT. And if you can introduce yourself, I’d love, love to hear a little bit about you.

Shane Montoya 04:58

Well, you. My name is Shane Montoya, and I have been selling real estate for about 23 and a half years. I put together a I started The Odd Couple team, if you will, back in 23 years ago, and we have evolved over the years and built a nice sized team, you know. And this is my business partner of 12 years, and my life partner of 26 and a half years. So

05:37

it’s actually business partner of 14, oh,

Shane Montoya 05:43

counting, but seems like a million.

Jason Koenig 05:46

Well, yeah, for sure. So I’m Jason Koenig. As Shane said, I’ve been in the business now for 14 years. I have a background in marketing and advertising. When Shane asked me to join him in real estate, I said, No way. I don’t want to wear khakis, I don’t want to drive a fancy car, and I want to change one life at a time, and I’m doing that in advertising, come to find out, joining Keller Williams, there was no better place and no better career to really help people transform their lives and change their lives, whether it be buying or selling real estate or agents growing their business.

Shane Montoya 06:32

So we have a team of 11 agents, including Jason and I, who are the owners of the team, and then we have two. We have three full time administrative assistants, one’s a transaction manager, one is a marketing manager, and one is our office manager. And we house ourselves. We have our own satellite offices outside of the market center. So just our team is in our offices and we’re but we broker everything out of the market center work, but our offices are separate and in our own space that we bought in a business district, and so sort of what our we’re in our backyard right now, at our office, where we oftentimes get to work, which is pretty fun and cool so

Daren Phillipy 07:26

well, and I was just saying earlier, before we jumped on, you are the first outdoors ot that we’ve had. So welcome to the great outdoors in the in a great white north. I’ve got the numbers. I pull them off of command. I know it pulls in some other things in there, but for the most part, I see that you close over the last 12 months, 411 units and 157 million in volume. And that’s about right. Is that right? Yeah, that

Shane Montoya 07:53

sounds about right. Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Seems right.

07:59

Well, good on that.

Daren Phillipy 08:01

So tell us a little bit about before we break into the the where you get your leads. Portion of it. Tell us about the dynamic when you have two leaders and you’ve got, you know, two owners. How does that work between the two of you? What is the org chart and the the responsibilities between you two? That’s how it works.

Shane Montoya 08:22

So I primarily focus on sales, and Jason primarily focuses on operations.

08:35

So yeah, so the dynamic, just like the name says the odd couple teams. Shane and I both have very, very different strengths. Shane is a pro at door knocking. Shane is a pro at scripting. Shane is a he’s objection handlers. He’s a pro with our sales team. That stuff doesn’t interest me a bit, I’m more about the events and the culture of our team and making things run smoothly and efficiently. So we kind of balance out that way. We very much divvied our responsibilities. I’m in charge of our operations team, our marketing and our events. Shane’s in charge of the sales agents.

Shane Montoya 09:21

Yeah, we it’s interesting because we work in the same building together, and we don’t do anything together, and sometimes there will be full days we don’t even see each other, which is nice, because when we get home at night as a couple in our personal lives, we actually have lots to talk about because we we’re not doing the same things together all day long. Very

09:52

good. I love that well. And I would argue, just to add one more thing to that, I would argue having a business partner that. That fills in your weaknesses is key to the success of any business, whether it be equal partners, like we are, or have having your first hire or your right hand person balance out your strengths. It’s so necessary. You may want to kill them sometimes, but you need that other person, you

Daren Phillipy 10:21

know, I’ve experienced that I always like, you know, I like spending time with people like me, but we never get anything done, and everything is messy. And so when I have someone that’s super organized and follows systems and don’t and they don’t break the rules, it really kind of drives me nuts. And at the same time, it’s the exact thing that I need. And so I

Shane Montoya 10:41

Yes, so we kind of, I like, I’m, I’m, like, sales and bright ideas and visionary. And Jason is slow down integrating. He’s the integrator on the team. I’m always by the time I bring him another idea you’ve forgotten about, yeah, I forgot about the idea that I gave him, you know, two weeks ago. And he’s like, wait, wait, wait, wait, we’re working on that. We gotta stop. We can’t work on that. We’re still working on your last idea. So he really helps with the red light, green light. What a

Daren Phillipy 11:15

cool dynamic I it’s just really unique. And thanks for sharing that. Let’s talk a little bit about your leads and where you get your leads, because you have a lot of agents, and you gotta feed them, so tell us about where you get your leads.

Shane Montoya 11:28

Well, we first and foremost, really try to have a culture of production. So we are pretty insistent that our agents and we let them know the expectation whenever we bring on a new agent that we really are, we expect to see them in the office making phone calls, doing production, having plans to door knock, doing open houses, and so on, so forth. So first and foremost, we always drive the sales team with big culture of production. And then from there, we have a variety of different lead sources. First of all, we have been branding. So we live in a the Twin Cities is Minneapolis and Saint Paul. And Minneapolis is a small city, and Saint Paul is a big town. And we are in Saint Paul and we have been branding the same brand, The Odd Couple team, for 23 years. And so we do a lot of different, you know, branding activities, whether we do and Jason will probably get more into this in a minute. But we do events, we do philanthropic work, we advertise in our little local newspaper. We advertise at the little local movie theater, the ads that come on before the movie starts, and just just our presence and constantly contributing back into the community on the different events that we do, just our brand brings in business. We have a pretty robust website with all the agents, videos, bios on there, and so we do get a lot of leads that just come through the website. And then I don’t, I don’t do as much production as I used to do, and so a lot of my business that I worked on in the first half of my career, when my clients call and they need to do a transaction or have a referral, a lot of times, my book of business is getting kind of funneled down into the team, and then we have internet leads that we actually use Boomtown, which I don’t know if we’ll How long will continue With that, but it’s worked really well for us. And so we then have a round robin system of internet leads that go to each of the agents, and we buy into Boomtown to where the each agent is getting if, if all the agents are actually plugged in that week, or that full month, they should get about 22 internet leads a week or, I mean, a month, excuse me, a month. So that’s a big variety of our of our business, well, and

14:11

we’re also, we’re testing command. We weren’t too quick on the uptick to use that, because it’s no secret there were some kinks to work out. We’re testing that now and then Shane alluded to us having a marketing manager, Amy, who’s been with us for 14 years as well, and she’s kind of gone from listing management to just doing marketing. And she’s doing Facebook, she’s doing all kinds of social media, which is driving things to our Boomtown account, in addition to paying for ads. Yeah,

Daren Phillipy 14:48

I was looking at, I was looking at your website. Your website looks fantastic, and you’re exactly right. You spent some time make sure that every person has their own video of of introduction, and it just really flows. Really well.

Shane Montoya 15:01

The other thing, the other thing that we have done as a staple of our business for years and years and years is we do philanthropic marketing, if you will. We always are. We always have, like, an annual coat drive and an and we have a biannual food drive. And then we also, really, whenever you guys have national night out, I’m sure it’s, it’s all around the country, right? So

Daren Phillipy 15:29

every night out, yeah, so national

Shane Montoya 15:31

night out here is the first week of August, and we, we actually sponsor Any registered National Night Out. Organized the national night out, we actually sponsor, if they register with us, we sponsor a grill packet for each of those national nights out. So for example, a couple weeks ago, when we had national night out, we actually sponsored like 75 parties in the neighborhood that we serve. And so we get to know the neighbors, because they come to us to pick up their grill packet. But then we divide up all the of the or the parties amongst our team, and we go out to the parties and make a five minute drop in during the party, bring another bag of swag, chips, sidewalk shop, Frisbees, all kinds of things, and just get to know the neighbors. And so we do a lot of things that support our community. And so that’s how we stay relevant within the community. And we get a lot of business from our philanthropic efforts well, and

16:37

a lot of when I joined Shane 14 years ago, I was I wasn’t good at any of the things he was good at, door knocking. Like the thought of door knocking or taking a cold phone call literally kills my soul. I wouldn’t get out of bed. But the one thing I knew I was good at was events and hosting things and getting people to like us through getting people to like me through philanthropic work. So doing those events, the National Night Out, the coat drive, the food drive, that just gained us a great reputation in the community, and organizing it was kind of fun. Um, but then we also do a quarterly event for the community every quarter, and then a quarterly client event. And those bring in leads, and that also gives our agents, pretty much every day of the year, they can just be calling their spear and their clients and inviting them to our client appreciation party, our pictures with Santa that’s at the local movie theater, our pumpkin patch that we do in our backyard, our kickoff to spring grill event, barbecue. So there’s always a reason for us to be contacting our spear. And it’s not just asking for business. It’s offering them something fun to do, and a date night, really. And it just brings in business. It makes it easy and fun. Set up the grind of who do you know, who wants to buy, sell or invest in real estate from church, school or work?

Shane Montoya 18:15

Another thing that we’re doing this, we just started the summer, and it’s starting to grow, is the last Thursday of the month. We invite a local vendor who has a food truck just to park next to our office, which is right in the neighborhood, and then all month long, we’re advertising to the neighborhood to stop in, use our backyard, have some food at the food truck. They buy the the people buy their own food. But we just invite the food truck to our office, and then we set out tables and put out some yard games and whatnot. And then people from the neighborhood just walk over and kind of congregate in our space, and the food truck is right there. So it’s just little things like that that we’re doing all the time well. And another

18:59

fun thing we did during COVID. We sorry you asked this. Yeah, right. No, that’s good part of our community. Um, during COVID, one of the things that I missed was going to the gym and doing group classes, prospect classes, or yoga, or whatever it may be. I actually recruited some of those trainers and paid them to come on every Tuesday and Thursday we did workouts in our backyard, and it was it got created camaraderie within our agent, but then also neighbors would just come. And we got several listings from it. They’re like, we loved you guys because you were the weird people who worked out twice a week and during COVID, and it just is building that reputation and getting ingrained in your community brings lead. We’re very community

Shane Montoya 19:47

based. So

Daren Phillipy 19:49

this is an I love that you said that, and I love that you guys are doing so many events, and I’ve talked to so many top teams doing events. How do you quantify. By the events that you’re doing and the results that you’re getting from that.

Shane Montoya 20:04

Now, that’s an interesting question. We quantify it, because at the beginning of this phone call, you said, in the last year, you’ve done 400 transactions and 150 million in business. It’s too hard other than just knowing your numbers, because we can’t really specify, specify this came from that, or this came from their you know, I think it’s just a compilation of the neighbors in our community. We try not the Twin Cities is 6 million people. We don’t, we don’t try to claim to be a specialist all over we decided to have a niche right here in our neighborhood, and we have a cute little neighborhood office, and the people who live in our community see they drive by our office and see our sign, they go to a movie and they see our advertisement, they open up the paper and they see our advertisement, they open up a social media and we’re there. Then they’re hearing about different events. And so it’s not it’s hard to quantify. I don’t know how to answer that question. It’s question I’ve never been able to answer. Has anyone ever called and said I I’m calling you specifically because I saw you at the movie theater? No, but I think a lot of it is we just see you around. You’re obviously the people to go to

21:13

now, I would argue, like after our larger events, like our client party, for example, we oftentimes talk to our agents and they’re like, Oh, I picked up a piece of business, or two pieces of business. I got referrals. So you can kind of quantify it loosely, and I try to quantify it when I do return on investment from our P and L, but I divvy out the like, the client expenses versus how many, how many past clients did we work with that year? And I would argue our best ROI would be past client and sphere, then Boomtown, then referrals,

Shane Montoya 21:57

perfect.

Daren Phillipy 21:58

Let I’m curious, and you may or may not be doing this. Do you have systems in place so when you have these events, you’re able to capture those leads or capture those referrals, or do they just organically come from being who you are in your community?

22:16

Very organic. Let’s be honest, it’s very organic. Just this year we started, yes, having a sign up sheet for if you want to know about more events. It took us 14 years to come up with one clipboard with a sign in sheet. Good for you. I think that was your idea, right. The little thing when

Shane Montoya 22:34

our our internal mission is to be a household name in real estate within a three mile radius of our office, and we just do that by being relevant.

22:44

When did that change? You have always

Shane Montoya 22:47

said five miles, but that puts us in like you put it at five. It’s three. It’s always been three, but you’d always say five, and that puts us like in North Minneapolis.

Daren Phillipy 22:59

We’ll debate this later. I know we’ll take a vote at the end. Let’s transition to listings. What do you do? Either unique or how do you leverage your listings to either stand out or capture more business? I’m

23:16

gonna let you take this sales manager. So

Shane Montoya 23:18

one of the things that we promote when we’re in the interview process of getting a listing, maybe we’re competing with another local agent or non local agent. We do use the power of the team, and we always offer that our entire team will come through their listing to give them a price opinion the agent themselves that is actually getting capturing that listing. Always give them a range or an opinion, but they they kind of sell that, but you’re going to get the opinion of 10 other people coming through. So that starts there. Of course, we always use the tools that are available to us. They’re coming soon, with photos and physics and whatnot. And then we always do neighbors opens neighbor neighbors only open house where we just it’s exclusive to just the neighbors, and we go out and hand invite those neighbors, have conversations with those neighbors, and let them know that we’re having a special open house that’s not being publicly advertised, but it’s just for that particular neighborhood. So we do that, and we do have two agents on our team who circle prospect around all of our listings and try to gain additional exposure and pick up appointments that way. So that’s our primary things that we’ve that we’re we’ve been doing.

24:43

Amy also does a lot of social media. They’re all hosts. Yes, does reels. She’ll oftentimes go out to the listings with the agent, and we’ll do videos and reels and stuff. So we have tools to be promoting online. And one thing. We encourage our agents to do we don’t mandate, but many of our agents do do it with open houses, making it a little special having the bottles of water we have a relationship with a bakery down the street. Have a little treat for people that come in, so you can leverage that listing. You’ve got those buyers and potentially people shopping you to be a seller, and you’ve made it special, and you’ll stand out about the other three open houses you’re going to go see. I

Shane Montoya 25:29

mean, oftentimes it’s because we are super local. You know, let’s say on a Saturday afternoon, there’s 10 open houses in the neighborhood. We might be four or five of them. So we do try to dominate there, and then the other thing that we’re finding a lot of success with is a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, one to five open house, especially in our condo associations that have 55 plus living we’re finding that we actually get more people to come to our open houses on a Wednesday afternoon than on a Saturday. So we’ve been really focusing a lot on daytime weekday open houses. We’re just, I mean, Jason just did one last week, and he had like 12 groups come through. That’s great, and potentially four pieces of business, yeah. Well, and the other thing that I’m the nice thing about that is, usually you’re the only one

Daren Phillipy 26:25

that’s all that makes makes sense with people, we

Shane Montoya 26:29

have found that with the people doing work from home or they’re they have more liberty to go out and do things during the daytime, and they they come to the opens, trust me, if you’re not doing Tuesday, if your team’s not doing opens on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday afternoon, certainly encourage it, because we’re seeing a lot of success with

26:48

it well. And this has been kind of my personal charge. I’ve had several listings that, I mean, we all are seeing stuff sit on the market a little bit longer, and I’m like, Well, I’m just sitting in the office doing prospecting and working. Why don’t I just consider 123, Main Street my office for an open house sign up there, and if I get two or three people that come in, that’s awesome. If no one comes in, that’s okay too. I’m still working, so I’ve found doing that during the week is benefiting me and possibly picking up business. I’m still getting my work done. The client likes that. I’m helping them out, and I look like I’m doing a good job. And, yeah, it’s just a win. Win. All are doing a good job. You don’t just look like, look, of course, I’m doing a good job.

Daren Phillipy 27:41

Shane’s in charge of uh, self talk. Good job there, Shane. Appreciate it. No negative self talk. So I’m really curious about this, because I know this is, this is something, and we’ve never spoken about it before. When you’re a mega team, you run out of space being inside of the market center. The Market Center in the model, basically says, at a certain point it makes sense for you to move out of of the market center. The Market Center does a lot of heavy lifting for you by bringing that culture and the training and all of that stuff that’s in there. Have you been able to build and and keep your culture being outside of a market center? How does that affect you?

28:21

What does that mean? That’s yours. Um, well, Shane does say I’m the cheerleader of the office. Um, I don’t know I I struggle with this one, because I really feel like we’re just really blessed with great people. But I think it does go a little deeper than that. We have our Tuesday meetings. After every Tuesday meeting, I make a home cooked lunch for the team. We eat together in the summers. We grill in the backyard, um, we we do team events like we do try to do a monthly Happy Hour saints game, things like that. I don’t know. I guess I feel like it’s not rocket science, so

Shane Montoya 29:08

I’ll type in here. So like I had said before, we make it a point when we bring on a new agent to let them know that we have a culture here where people are present, because when people are present, we’re learning from one another, we’re hearing one another, and we our expectation is that they will be present. And now we don’t mandate hours or days of the week that they must be there, but overwhelmingly so, we ask the agents that when we’re considering each other, to work with one another, that that they understand that that is our culture. So I think it starts there, and then every Tuesday we feed them, and they love it. And so on Sunday or Monday evening, Jason literally is making a lunch for 15 people. And. And he brings it in, and we have a weekly sales meeting at the almost exact same time as our market center is. So we sort of are a mini Market Center, but we have our mini meeting and we do scripting, or we talk about hot topics. We always invite a lender. Sometimes we’ll have a guest speaker for from title or wherever, maybe a, you know, a sewer scope person or whatever, and then it’s followed by lunch right after that. Or if we have tours where agents have promised a listing that we’re going to bring all the agents through for a price opinion, we go from Team meeting to our tour, and then we come back for lunch. And I think that in itself, along with just our we’ll take everyone to a baseball game once a year. We have our holiday dinner once a year. Just those things in general, just create culture. And honestly we we have agents that have been on our team for 14 years, 13 years, nine years, seven years, five years, well. And

31:06

I think as you grow, or as you create that team culture, if you will, I argue we’re like a family. As Shane and I are creating, that the agents start to and the admins start to pick up some of that heavy lifting. I’ve got an agent right now who’s organizing the fantasy football thing, and we have a team fantasy football draft, and then something that we can banter about. Then all winter long,

Shane Montoya 31:36

our agents have become friends. I mean, honestly, like Jason and I are going to our floor, our Florida condo in December, and one of the agents and his wife are going to join us for a week. I mean, we just, we’re just friends.

Daren Phillipy 31:51

So, so, um, it really, really blows me away that you’re able to keep agents because, you know, inherently, agents stay 18 months. Don’t be married to them too much. You don’t really start reaping the benefits of a an agent on your team until you start your finish your first year and you’re into the second. That’s when they’re starting to get that traction. How are you able to retain agents from five to 14 years?

Shane Montoya 32:23

Handcuffs, we’re a high producing team, and a lot of a lot of teams rainmakers, do a lot of cherry picking, and then hand off the bottom of the barrel of the low hanging fruit to their team. I don’t do that. I will give a million and a half dollar buyer or seller as easily as I’ll give a $250,000 buyer or seller. I try to keep it very equal in terms of what I give with agents like I don’t, we don’t, I don’t cherry pick. First of all, if I want to do some business this particular month, I’ll just take what I want, you know, but overwhelmingly, I just don’t cherry pick. And we do feed the agents good leads. I mean, really good leads and good events. And we have really good, rock solid administrative services. Our admin team, one of our admins, been with us for 14 years, and the other’s been with us for like nine, and they know what they’re doing, and there is a good value here. Our splits are arguably very, very, very competitive in terms of, like, what we they’re high. Yeah, our splits are higher than our splits are higher than most, but we offer a really good package, and we also, we probably bring in one recruit for 30 interviews. We don’t bring anybody in. We’re very, very tight like group, and we know that adding one toxic individual can dismantle everything. So we also make our, almost our entire team, be a part of the interview process. You gotta have a yes from us all, or you’re voted off the island, wow, or you’re never voted into the island

34:24

well, and I would argue most people don’t be, and real estate’s a little different, but most people aren’t going to leave a team or a job due to the money. They may say it’s the money, but when it comes down to it, it’s that culture and what they’re benefiting and what makes them feel whole. So we work really hard to offer the full package, the events for them to call on the family atmosphere. Yes, a part of it is the leads they need to feel valued. Um, we make our people feel valued

Shane Montoya 35:04

so good, and we feed them everywhere, and we feed them

Daren Phillipy 35:06

people. I mean, I am curious what we had for lunch today.

35:10

We had so we had Mediterranean grilled chicken and shrimp bowls with fresh tzatziki and pita chips and hummus.

Daren Phillipy 35:21

Jeez Louise,

35:24

I spent two hours last night

Shane Montoya 35:26

grilling. He MacGyvered that out of our garden in kitchen last night, just this happened,

Daren Phillipy 35:32

wow, we’ll be definitely shipping you down here. Um,

Shane Montoya 35:34

we do it without fail. And the other thing that we do too is we have, we have some we have senior agents on the team that the agents that have been on our team the longest and that have that have the highest production, and we let them be a part of things, decision making. We let them run meetings. We meet with our leadership group every week, on Monday, and we talk about what’s going on in the market. Let’s talk, talk about what’s going on in the amongst the agents who needs help. Where are we going to help them? And so we help, we we keep agents engaged in the day to day activity, at least those are interested, or those that should be, because they’re, you know, high level producers, so making them be a part of of those types. I mean, ultimately, we are the decision makers, but we get input from all of them. But

36:30

I do think Shane brings up a good point there, even when it was just Shane and I and one admin and one or two agents, as we grew we kept those agents involved with business planning every year and quarterly check ins every year, and they all felt a buy in. And as we grew, we tried having all agents be a part of it. But if any of you have ever tried doing business planning with 20 people, it’s not so we paired it back to the OG again, but we did then have a Senior Agent lead a business planning, SWOT analysis with all the other agents at the same time, so people felt heard, and then we would review that as leadership, but keeping everyone on your team involved and feeling like they have a voice.

Shane Montoya 37:23

Now, we have attrition as well. I mean, we’re, we’re not, you know, we have attrition and we have agents that leave. I will say, though it’s interesting, because, you know, we had some pretty seasoned people leave us recently who were producing, you know, their their income after the split was between 150 and 200,000 a year and a half ago in this past year, they’re like less than half of that. So they think that even though they really didn’t see the value here and left to go find a better value at another team, they discovered that maybe it’s not as green on the other side of the fence as it was well, and we do have attrition

Daren Phillipy 38:05

that 150 to 200 is a net number, not a gross number. That’s something that most individual agents miss out on. What mistake have you learned from recently that you’ve made by running a team.

Shane Montoya 38:28

I think my biggest mistake is I have been probably a little too loose with me, passing past clients to agents on the team, and then not so much that, but letting them do all the Keep in touch. And I have sort of taken a backseat to that. So what I’m finding is oftentimes it’s a catch 22 right? Might be a really good past client of mine that I hand to an agent, and then they do the buy, sell with them, and then keep in touch with them. And I have not done a great job of keeping in touch with them, just assuming that that agent might stay with me all forever. And you know, I think I risk losing clientele based off of my lack of being involved Once I pass them to an agent on the team, so that for me is probably my biggest mistake in general, but so far so good. I’m sure I’ve lost a few but you know, I think as long as we’re keeping our agents happy and on the team, I won’t have a problem with that. So good. I

39:46

guess for me, it was a light bulb moment, probably about a year ago, when we did lose several agents, and I’m so okay with having lost them, but one of Shane. Nice conversations was, Jason, you need to go easier on the agents that are difficult because they’re top producers. They’re difficult you and your operations team pick on them because they’re maybe not turning in files the way you want, or this or that. They’re they’re harder. And it was a real light bulb moment for me to realize and be okay with, people who are really good at sales are kind of difficult to work. They just are well, and it’s our job, from an operations standpoint, to figure out what their needs are and support their needs so they can go get more business, feel whole, feel appreciated, and it’s going to benefit all of us,

Shane Montoya 40:47

I think, of the conversation. So I think the conversation too was like, Jason is very, was very about rigid, rigid, equal services for each agent. And I think what we learned from that was an agent who is bringing in hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of GCI to the team may need to have elevated services, versus an agent who’s not bringing in. So it can’t be that equal. And yeah, they are a little more scattered sometimes because they’re busy, you know? So I think, yeah, that was a good it

41:24

was a big light bulb moment for me, and it’s changed how we, from an operation standpoint, provide service to some of the agents that are still here, and I feel as if they’re happier here,

Daren Phillipy 41:42

and it’s such great insight from both you guys lessons. I appreciate you sharing that I’m about ready to ask you guys while asked this last question, now is the time to be able to raise your digital hand. For those who don’t know where they are, it’s where it says reactions. In that reaction section down at the bottom, you just click on that, raise your hand and and we’ve we’ll have about 10, 1015, thanks.

42:06

Jay has a question. Jay’s raising his hand. Jay’s

Daren Phillipy 42:09

going to wait, Jay, I don’t, Jay knows where that button is. Jay, raise, push the button, dude. Um, you for Okay, I’ll let you ask a question in just a second. Good job. Um, so my last question is this, um

Shane Montoya 42:27

Sean, is that your digital hand, or is that your background? It’s a hand. That’s a hand. There you go. No, there’s a hand behind you. Okay,

Daren Phillipy 42:43

Jane, are you distracted or what? No hand. Daren Shane, I’ve got a really important question to ask Jason, if we’re coming, if the OT is going to come on Tuesday to the team meeting, what is the one lunch you’re going to make for us that is just going to blow our mind.

43:04

That shouldn’t go to me, that should go to Shane. I you know, it’s a struggle we have. We gave the whole team steak and lobster one day. We did do steak and lobster. You know what I’m going to do, just your good old fashioned baked potato bar with marinated chicken and marinated steak and shrimp and all the fixings, and you get to make your own baked potato with all the things that.

Daren Phillipy 43:33

That is a fantastic choice. I grew up my mom would make baked potato bars, but I never got steak on a baked potato bar. It’s very, very much have half the stick of butter. So, so good, so good. All right, let’s go ahead. I don’t want Jay to get all mad because he can’t. He didn’t get asked this question, Jay, go ahead, do your thing.

Jay Hendrix 43:55

Well, there’s so much I want to say, but, but anyway, what I will say first is, is, Daren, I’m leaving. I’m moving to St Paul because I want to be part of their team. I mean, yeah, I love, I absolutely love the way you talk about your culture, that’s, that’s on your team, and, you know, it’s, it’s such a struggle for us anyway, so man, you, you’ve, you’ve certainly challenged me with a lot of things. I love the just the little things you do to make your all I believe all your team really loves how you guys appreciate them. So whether they’re on the operational side or on the on the sales side, which is always a struggle for us, we’re constantly fighting that struggle. But my question really is, when you bring a when you bring a agent that that has some production level onto your team, and they’ve already sort of gotten used to a certain culture. How do you, I mean, I hear you guys being very protective of your culture, which fantastic. How do you? How do you help that person sort of transition and become. Some part of your culture

Shane Montoya 45:03

that’s a really easy one. We only bring on new agents. We don’t want to break old habits. We bring on new agents and we mold them into what we want.

Jay Hendrix 45:17

So you don’t necessarily take somebody that, somebody that’s that’s got, that’s a seasoned agent already. That’s not really your person.

45:23

We don’t really have a lot of those. I’m trying to Yeah. We really haven’t had any. The only one was Ryan,

Shane Montoya 45:29

yeah, yeah. Honestly, we don’t pursue we honestly don’t pursue anyone. Most agents who reach out to us are brand new, and most of them are agents that just know our brand from being a part of the community, and they drive by our sign every day, and when they get their license, they just stop in. But we, I don’t even know how to answer that question, because we honestly just have not had an emphasis on recruiting agents with a book of business. We have just helped agents create a book of business. Thanks. Oh, my battery’s running well, well, and I would argue, we have interviewed some agents over the years that do have a book of business, some with a really good book of business. And as we’ve gone through the process, either they or we’ve discovered that it’s probably not a good cultural fit, whether it be they want to do their own marketing stuff, the splits aren’t right. Yeah, it’s hard with a seasoned agent. So my computer says I have six minutes of backyard battery left.

Daren Phillipy 46:43

Okay, John, go ask your question. I’ll get super we’ll be done when, apparently, you fall off. Right?

46:49

Sorry, no,

46:50

that’s alright. So we’ll go quick. But, I mean, this could be a long answer, but you know, we really kind of glossed over the fact that you guys closed 411 units, and it’s like, oh, that didn’t just magically happen. And I know you guys have been in the business for a long time, but talk to what is your, what is your what’s been your trajectory, and what are the pieces been that you’ve put into place that’s taken you from one level to an the next level? Or has it just been gradually, truly gradual, it’s,

47:27

I would say, and Shane may disagree with me, but I would say it’s been truly gradual. And a lot of it, I think, has really been slowly building that brand and the farming we’ve done in our community, and each year it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more referrals. I think it’s grown very natural. I would attribute design, but

Shane Montoya 47:54

I would attribute our community philanthropic work, and then our community based. And so I based events has attributed to our growth for the most part. I don’t know if that answers your question. No,

48:09

it does. I mean, I just didn’t know if there was any one piece of your business that, like took you from, you know, 100 to your 300 or is it again? Is it just, I’ll

Shane Montoya 48:19

be honest with you, we I think what changed our business completely was moving out of the market center and opening up and putting our brand on our building in a quaint little business district in in our city. That’s awesome. Um, we just kind of became a part of we became the

Daren Phillipy 48:40

battery that that must have been it, that must have been that six, that must have been it. He

48:45

was about to say, we became what? What did they become?