Episode 48: Her Open House Secret – Lysi Bishop Real Estate

From Hustling Solo to Leading a Luxury Real Estate Empire: Lessons from Lysi Bishop on The OT

“Anything you do with consistency will work.”

That single line, shared by Lysi Bishop during her guest appearance on The OT: Only Teams for Real Estate with host Daren Phillipy, perfectly sums up her 30-year real estate journey.

In this powerful and practical mastermind session, Lysi pulls back the curtain on how she built one of the most productive and well-known luxury real estate teams in the country—closing 273+ transactions and over $241 million in volume in the past year alone. And she didn’t just scale with brute force—she scaled with vision, values, and systems.

If you’re a team leader, aspiring mega agent, or anyone serious about building a highly leveraged and deeply service-oriented real estate business, this OT episode is pure gold.

Here’s an in-depth breakdown of Lysi’s playbook, mindset, team model, and the core philosophies that power her Boise-based luxury real estate team.

From Solo Agent to Real Estate Icon: Lysi’s Backstory

Lysi Bishop started her real estate career over three decades ago—before Keller Williams had a foothold in her market, and before luxury real estate even existed in Boise. Her early business was built through nothing but hard work, referrals, and an obsession with exceeding client expectations.

She joined Keller Williams about 12–14 years ago, bringing with her a powerful foundation built during the Great Recession. While others pulled back, she reinvested. While others paused, she pushed forward. That grit propelled her to the top of her market—by 2006, she was not just leading, but separating herself by over 30% from her closest competitor.

The Secret Sauce: Her Open House Tour System

While most agents treat open houses as an occasional tactic, Lysi turned it into a high-leverage lead generation machine—a weekly, branded, highly systemized experience called the Open House Tour.

Here’s what sets it apart:

✔️ Consistency is Queen

• Runs 44 Sundays a year (skipping only major holidays).
• Houses are scheduled a week and a half in advance and finalized by Tuesday or Wednesday.

✔️ Six to Fifteen Listings Per Tour

• Minimum of 6 homes, max of 15.
• Each listing is part of a driving tour, with a branded tour sheet that includes addresses, property features, and QR codes.

✔️ Signage Strategy That Dominates

• Agents are expected to place 12–15 signs per home to create massive visibility.
• This contributes to the illusion (and reality) that her team is everywhere.

✔️ Door-Knocking with Value

• Every open house is promoted in-person to neighbors with elegant door hangers and genuine invitations.
• The messaging? “Hey neighbor, come take a look—or send a friend who’s buying.”

✔️ Multi-Channel Marketing Blitz

• Social media ads (Facebook, Google, Instagram) managed by a dedicated marketing team.
• Weekly email blast to a growing, organic list of 6,000+ subscribers.
• Posts made easy for agents with collateral prepared by virtual assistants in the Philippines.

✔️ Post-Tour Follow-Up = Fortune

• Every visitor is entered into a follow-up system in their CRM.
• Lysi emphasized the importance of having a consistent, structured follow-up plan—”don’t let the lead stop at the door.”

Result: More listings. More buyer conversations. And more market dominance through repetition and exposure.

Behind the Scenes: The Lysi Bishop Team Org Chart

Lysi has built a team of just under 50 people. But what makes it unique is how clearly every person is placed and leveraged.

📊 Key Org Chart Highlights:

• Lysi Bishop – Founder and visionary. Focuses on listings, leadership, and growth.
• Scott Bishop (husband) – Runs operations and business building as head of the “Success Team.”
• Cynthia – VP of Sales and Training, focused on agent onboarding, education, and growth.
• Agents are divided by function:
  • Listing Specialists (in yellow)
  • Buyer Specialists (in purple)
• Client Services – Manages front desk, 7 days a week.
• Listing Concierge Team – Handles white-glove services for sellers (prepping, staging, photos, etc.).
• Marketing Department – Includes:
  • A copywriter
  • A visual designer
  • A digital marketer
• Virtual Assistants – Based in the Philippines, used for repetitive, scalable work.
• Runners – Crucial field staff who check properties weekly, prep listings for showings, flush toilets, open blinds—true next-level service.

“We try to be the client’s new best friend. That’s what the concierge experience is about.” – Lysi Bishop

🚀 Systems, Leadership, and Leverage

Lysi was candid about the evolution of her leadership style and the team’s internal structure. At one point, they made a major pivot to focus on culture. But they soon realized they had swung the pendulum too far.

“We made people feel good—but forgot to keep our eye on productivity.”

The fix? A massive reorg:

• Eliminated the “VP of Everything” model that created silos.
• Rebuilt the team around one company, one language, one mission.
• Brought back focus on production metrics and client service—anchored in what she calls “unreasonable hospitality.”

Inspired by the Will Guidara book of the same name, unreasonable hospitality became not just a client-facing philosophy, but a core team culture value. Every department is expected to treat clients and each other with above-and-beyond excellence.

Mistakes, Tough Conversations, and Grace

When asked how she handled the team’s transition back to productivity, Lysi dropped a masterclass in leadership wisdom:

• “Clear is kind.” Be honest, be direct, and lead with love.
• Tough conversations make room for the right people to either step up—or gracefully step out.
• Lead with gratitude, even for those who choose to leave. “Every mistake made us better.”

Final Nuggets of Wisdom from Lysi

• 📌 “Hard work travels across every market.” Market shifts don’t hurt the disciplined.
• 📌 “Don’t be afraid to contract out until you’ve earned the right to build in-house.” This applies to TCs, marketing, and admin.
• 📌 “If you want to own the market, show up in it—physically and digitally—consistently.”

🎧 Catch the Full Episode

This is one of the most detailed and generous episodes of The OT to date. Whether you’re a solo agent thinking about building your first team or already leading a mega team, this conversation is packed with plays you can implement today.

▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube
🎙️ Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts – Search “The OT: Only Teams for Real Estate”
🌐 Visit OnlyForTeams.com to learn how to scale your team the right way.

If this episode fired you up, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with another team leader who needs to hear it.

Want help applying these models to your business? Book a strategy session with Daren Phillipy and find out how Keller Williams The Marketplace supports team leaders like you in scaling big—with systems, culture, and profit.

Transcription

Lysi Bishop Real Estate

Daren Phillipy  00:13

thanks for showing up to this week’s uh, OT, um. Guys, you guys have just stumbled on. First of all, happy new year. So glad that we’re back those two weeks of being off is like, sucks, and I’m ready to tear up 2025 I don’t know if you guys are, but it is. I am itching to make money and to grow something big. I talked to Lisa Bishop couple months ago. I think maybe you’ve been booked for about three months, and you guys are about ready to learn from an OG that is so smart, and she took something so simple and has really made a massive business. So Lysi Bishop from Boise, Idaho. Little, little side note, you closed over the last 12 months. My numbers that I have, which comes from command, you closed 273 units and 241 million in volume. That was before your end,

Lysi Bishop  01:17

but that’s ballpark, not counting December numbers. That’s correct,

Daren Phillipy  01:20

awesome. So thanks for hanging out with us. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about your team, your history in real estate. Little bit, little bit about that,

Lysi Bishop  01:29

absolutely. So I’ve been in real estate for about 30 years, little over 30 years, and came to Keller Williams sometime maybe 12 or 14 years ago. I was a solo agent and operated most of my years in those early years as a solo agent, just repeat referral and and I’m a very, very hard worker, and so the business just grew out of that repeat and referral. As we entered into the Great Recession, I kept working very hard, kept putting money into the business. And while I was always in the top 10 going into that 2006 market, it was very evident that when that market turned that what I was doing was different than others, and suddenly I was the top and the next closest was about 30% behind me. And it really just came from having a strong work ethic. One of the things that I love about the 2024 market, or any of the post COVID markets is they, they do require us to have good working habits. Luck may not prevail. And I think that for any of us who are hard workers and committed to whatever we set our goals to and accomplishing those goals and serving at the highest level, we prevail in any market. And so I think that whether it’s a 2011 which was the bottom of the market for us here, whether it’s the 2024 or anything in between, we always have great opportunities. So I’m grateful to have been a part of the big Keller Williams group that I could learn from. And when we talk about this open house tour. It’s not something I invented when I was brand new to Keller Williams. There was something called agent mountain. It was just basically the library of where you could go to learn from other agents. And Gary would get on the phone with you and record a basically a podcast style. And I think we had video. It was all audio. And so I went and listened, and there were some agents out of Texas that did something called an open house tour. What they did is they were listing based agents. So I’m going to assume that you’re listing based agents. If you’re not, you can still create something like this at a small level or a large level. It was just such an easy grab and go playbook that we just took it and ran with it. And so agent Mountain was an incredible resource, and because I learned it from that, I’ve always tried to give that back to other agents when they’ve asked. So Jason Abrams had called, and I don’t think we even had an agenda. You just said, Hey, I know you do luxury at all price points. Can I interview you for the MRA podcast? And what came out of that was probably Jason is so well versed in in bringing it down to what’s the one thing that my one thing that is easy to duplicate, and that is a very important part of our success, is open houses.

Daren Phillipy  04:14

Now, Jason is so good at simplifying what you guys do, and I’m excited to tear it into that tell us a little bit about and I’m going to share your org chart. It’s not the pretty one, but it still looks amazing. Alright, give us a little rundown of what is your org chart look like, and I’m going to make sure are you guys looking at the org chart right now?

Lysi Bishop  04:37

So we are a large team. We are under 50, but we are pretty close to 50, and we are because we are luxury, and we’ve done luxury for many, many years, we provide a higher level of service than then maybe is needed. However, what that requires is to admin. For every agent, and that’s a tough org organization to be profitable in, unless you’re large. So I do not recommend that. It is not what the mrea book tells us to do. So this is only once you have a very, very strong foundation and we’re ready to run with it. You’ll see my name up at the top. It says Lisa Bishop as the founder. My husband used to do new construction years and years and years ago. We had separate businesses. He came in when we came over to Keller Williams, and has done the business building, the team building portion of the business. He does not oversee sales, but he oversees the all of what we call the success team. It’s the administrative team. So you’ll see at the top, you have me, and Scott should be right up there with me. He’s got himself a little bit lower down, but we, we kind of divide and conquer with me right now, I have one EA I might end up you can see this was done back in December to prepare for the year they show me, and that if you look at the right all those green people is executive assistants, and we’re thinking of maybe adding virtual to it some vas, but right now, I really just have one assistant. This is just giving us our organization of where we may be going. We always plan in advance. Scott is right next to me on the left. He has an EA who is his right hand and she executes. We do a lot of personality tests, such as a disc test, to figure out where our strengths are. And Scott’s strength is not in finishing something. He has great vision. He can see how to do it, and he needs to have a finisher behind him. So we know this, and we always make sure that he’s paired with a finisher. So Anna Karen is his EA, his finisher, and together they conquer the success team. And Anna Karen has this brilliant brain where she can architect how things are created. I would say we should have up the top there, it should be Scott. We see and Cynthia, that green box that’s just below Scott. It’s a light green. Cynthia is VP of sales training in sales, and we are on a growth trajectory right now. Our growth is that we want to increase our agent count for several different reasons. My age. I started this 30 years ago, and some of other agents are also 30 years in the business, we, at some point, maybe 15 years from now, might decide we want to retire. None of us are looking at retiring soon, but we want to make sure that we are always building our bench and building this extraordinary level of service. And so this year, we have said we are looking to growth and adding new agents, and Cynthia is taking on that role of the agent training. So from there, if we were to clean this up, and the pretty version that Daren has, you’ll see all of us across the top. And then you can see the org chart below. Agents are in purple. We separate those out by buyer specialists and listing specialists. So we’re the older model that when I came to kW, they said, if you’re going to be a team lead, you have to separate as listing specialists and buyer specialists. That still works very well for our team, but we recognize some have gone away from that. Purple are all the buyer specialists. Yellow are the listing specialists. And what you’ll see is we, we are a listing based business, that’s where all of the business is generated from. And then, of course, the buyers do get a large amount of repeat and referral, but they’re so well known off of a listing based business. Aren’t inside sales. We, we don’t master inside sales. If we were to say, Gosh, what does the Local Group do? They master inside sales. Our inside sales really acts more as assistance for the agents. When the agents can’t keep up with the follow up, they give it to Isa, and Isa just nurtures for them. So it’s not really going to be a traditional KW is a team, our Client Services team. It’s just moving to the right on the big, thick portion. There they are the team that runs the front desk. We’re open seven days a week, so there’s three people so that we can be manning that front desk from that eight to six time period, from, you know, for seven days a week listing department, because we are listing listing based business, the listing agents have incredible help. They basically have a Concierge Team underneath them that becomes the client’s new best friend to move forward all of the admin tasks. When I started with this, it was me and one assistant. When I got out of the one assistant who would essentially be an EA, first thing I did was hire a listing manager, and that listing manager ran everything in the listing department so it can just be one person that having that concierge level service so that I could be out on sales and somebody’s new to best friend was always there to take the call and give them what they needed was probably my best success story. You can always farm out I found we can always farm out TC work. TC is admitted. Straight up, we’re going through our list. However, listing manager, that person, that new best friend, is concierge service that is so critical. So that’s been a huge secret to our success. Nothing in my world is secret, but that would be a great part of our success

Daren Phillipy  10:17

real quick, because I I’m daydreaming having four transaction coordinators. And you said, What about what? Which was your key transaction

Lysi Bishop  10:29

coordinators don’t need to be in house if I was going to decide what I was going to hire and what I was going to pay per transaction, contract out. TC, I would contract out until I had enough work to hire my own. That would be one of the last things I would bring in house for me personally, in our area, you have some very good TCS who you can contract out to in that orange. Two of them are in house. Jenny is the listing side TC, because our listing side is so different than buyer side. Seth is buyer’s ITC listing and buyer, the other two are contracted. When we get to capacity, we just contract out, and they have all of our systems in place, and they just run it as if they are in house. Gotcha, okay, moving to the right. The other secret sauce in our daily day to day life is having a runner. Our runners do so much more than running again, doing luxury. When we have an upper end home, the runners go ahead of us. They open the house, turn on all the lights, get it all prepared, so that we aren’t sweating and out of breath when the buyer arrives. So they do everything that there is out in the field. Run property disclosure forms, pick them up. They check every single house a minimum of once a week. Run the water, flush the toilets weren’t in a area where it freezes, and so they are available to do everything, so that we aren’t pulling our agents out of the field to go to administrative house, check work and design team, because we were listing based business, and we want everything to look luxury. Go to our website, Lisa bishop.com, you’ll see there’s a beautiful look to all of our listings. We have a designer in house who goes in creates the home preparation plan so that all of our listings are curated before they hit the ground. Now there’s two things that we do. We either make them beautifully curated, or we price them appropriately as a fixer upper. I don’t turn anything away for being a fixer upper. I just price appropriately and make sure that my marketing write up says opportunity knocks a blank canvas to do what you want. Then marketing department, we have three in marketing. One writes all the copy. This she goes to the house, meets with the seller, writes the copy. Another one does everything visual. So they’re doing all of our and all of our collateral is by a designer who does that together. And the third is social. So whether it is running or Google ads, doing command ads for Facebook or Insta, or whether it is videoing, or whatever it might be that’s he’s all on digital side. Then we do exercise virtual and we’ve had great luck with hiring out of the Philippines anything that you don’t need to have somebody in house. There are great VAs who specialize in real estate. It did take us several tries. And even when we need to expand that team, sometimes it takes three hires to get the right one. And when you get the right one, they’re amazing. So we do have extra help in the Philippines, and that’s the org chart.

Daren Phillipy  13:37

So awesome. Love, love, love that. Thank you for going over that. I wish it was the pretty one, but that told the perfect story. I want to talk a little bit about leads. We’re going to because we’re going to go back on the leverage portion. I want to talk about what it’s like to lead that, what systems you do, but how do you create leads for a massive team like that?

Lysi Bishop  14:01

So we’re at the stage being 30 years into it, but we’re very fortunate. It just the phones ring. Being honest is that we spent all those early years building the snowball, and we are not the best anymore about going out and doing our lead gen. One of the things that I think we can do a lot better with is lead gen. We have one anchor, one rock of lead gen, which is that open house tour. It’s every weekend, every Sunday, 44 Sundays a year. We do skip Easter, Christmas, Mother’s Day, but when you have a consistent plan, anything you do with consistency, it will work. And it will work magically, not overnight, not the first time. But for us, this consistency in doing open houses every Sunday, 44 Sundays a year. In our model, we do a minimum of six open houses. 12 to 15 is like the max we can do, and that’s pushing it just in the management side of it. But if you think about. If you see somebody sign, and you can do this with two open houses every weekend, especially if you’re farming a certain area. Do it with four. You can do it with anything one. But when somebody sees your signs over and over and over again, you list everything in that neighborhood. Gosh, Lisa, I see your signs everywhere. What is true? We carry a heavy listing load, and sometimes I wonder, are they seeing our signs, or is it just actually our open house signs for each one of our open houses the agents have available to them? Well, they can get up to 15, but I try to get them, like, put up at least 12 Open House signs. Being honest, sometimes you only do six however, the more signs they put up, the higher traffic they get, and the more activation that you’re you’re going to see more people coming in and more people seeing you. Buyers will follow those signs. And sometimes, when it’s it’s really dreary outside here, when things are really brown, it’s hard to see an open house sign. Our color scale is it’s a two tone gray with a gold. So it’s like a silver and gold. And you just when things are brown, you don’t see them easily. So being able to put out enough signs that you get people there is the least expensive, most effective way to get people into your open house and people do business with who they like, who they know. Do they trust? Yeah, so they know you when you’re doing open houses every weekend. So

Daren Phillipy  16:28

I want to share, I want to share with you this place. So just for those who don’t know, we have this Millionaire Real Estate Agent playbook, and this is created by spending time with Jason Abrams, and either like the podcast on the Millionaire Real Estate Agent podcast, or being on a panel at Mega camp or family reunion, what do you what Jason does is takes what LISI does and simplifies it into a play, and so, so we can implement these ideas. And so this is what was created, and it’s in the Millionaire Real Estate, real estate agent playbook. And if you could kind of go, you kind of went through it, but touch on some of the spots that you think are important for us to to, yeah, as we go through and

Lysi Bishop  17:13

if you send out notes from from these meetings, this is something that’s great to send out, because it is spelled out so well. Really, I just started talking, and Jason’s team built this, which is amazing. They have a gift to go ahead and distill down any system that you’re interested in. So if you are not already listening the to the mrea podcast, go ahead and subscribe to it, because you’ll get an email. You’ll get a link to it. That is one of the most every time I listen to that, Jason has a gift at interviewing people and pulling out incredible systems. So this shows what we really do. So during the call, and Jason was trying to interview me on luxury at all price points, and this just came out, he was asking me questions, and I may not have been as we were just talking, but he was able to create this sheet. So we make a decision, hey, we’re going to do an open house. We do it about a week and a half in advance. We map out our schedule. It is chaos. It you know, homes sell new homes. Come on, what have you. So we just know that. But if we don’t have an aim of where we’re going to go, we never get there. So we set our aim a week and a half in advance, so we know what we’re working with. We don’t finalize it until a few days in advance. We probably have it done by Tuesday or Wednesday before the Sunday open house tour. So we have our aim. We know who we want to do. We make sure that we’re able to get in touch with those sellers. Can you do an open house? We have our field coordinators go out and look at them. Are they clean? Are they clean? Are they prepared? So that aim lets us know how to solve for any issues. Then we go ahead. We’ve got them finalized early in the week, that same week that we’re going to be doing them on Sunday, and it gets moved over to marketing and field coordinator team. So what you’ll see on this is, and I don’t I’m not sharing my screen, so I won’t be able to to guide you through this. Daren, if you go down to step three, there you go. So what we do is we create a tour sheet, and it is just a driving tour. So people, when they see one home, they get some facts on it, and then they have a map and facts on the other homes. Sometimes they’ll scan the QR code. Other times they will look at it and go, Oh my goodness, my grandson’s moving here, and he’s going to be going to BSU and look, you have this great little rentals. They might come in a $2 million home, but they actually are looking for a rental property for their grandson. This tour sheet is so valuable because it lets people know what else is out there, and they literally will drive to that next house. So that’s available on the day of the open house, and it’s in every one of those six, or however many open houses. We run social, and again, we have Brian. His job is social. So whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Google, whether it’s in. Graham, he’s going to be posting it there. And then we also have our virtual assistant in the Philippines creating some beautiful posts and posting them in our teams channel. So our agents can go ahead and pull pretty collateral and put it right on their own Insta or Facebook, whatever they’re doing. So we’re promoting the agents as well. What we want the agents to be able to do is say, these are our listings. They aren’t. Least these listings, if you’re a buyer specialist, like they’re our listings. Hey, we just listed this. Hey, we have this. Hey, I’m hosting our listing at 123, ABC Street. We’d love to see you over the weekend. So those are very important social videos, every agent on the team that’s talking a little bit about it. It’s not only videos. It might be that. It’s just a still shot that goes on there right now, if you’re watching, well, what I’m watching on my Insta, to keep up with trends is like carousels are very much back in style, as well as just so whether the carousel is that you have to swipe, or whether it runs on its own, we’re seeing a little bit more of that and a little bit less video. So we test things and we change them as the market commands. Then the open house will be on all the third party sites in our area. If you just go into MLS and you say open Sunday, one to 4pm all the IDX feeds, go to Zillow, realtor.com, hot pads, whatever it is. So we make sure we take advantage of that free advertising. Because a lot of people will look at Zillow or whatever their favorite place is. Then when it says E blast or open house database, what we do for every single Open House is when people you can either go on our website and sign up for it. So go to Lisa bishop.com you can sign up for the open house tour so you can see what we send out every Friday. It is super consistent. We never miss a beat, even if we say happy holidays. We will be resuming our open house tour on January 5. We’re going to still make sure that we’re letting you know what’s happening every Friday, like clockwork, that email goes out. So if you wanted to just be able to get a sample, you can sign up for that. If you’re tired of it, just unsubscribe. Easy breezy. What that does is we have that list is about 6000 people. Everybody who comes through the open house is offered the opportunity to sign up for it, whether they have an agent or not, because we want to sell our listings, and so we’re doing a service to the seller. So we have an organic list that grows and shrinks. It’s always growing, but you get people who unsubscribe. You get new people on so every single open house they have the opportunity to sign up for the open house tour. They can sign up on our website and or when I go out on a listing appointment, I tell people I have signed you on our open house tour so that you can see what we do and how we will market your home. And feel free to unsubscribe so everybody is organically put on. It’s not just arbitrary. And from there, what happens is they get that like clockwork. So when you’re looking at repetition, consistency, doing business with people who like you, know you and trust you. You’ve already done the hard work. They already like you. They already trust you because of what you’ve done for them in your prior interactions, but you want to make sure they always know you. And so everybody has 10 friends in real estate. Let’s make it easy on them to remember us and that open house tour, email, the newsletter. Email and those open house signs, as well as your real estate signs, make it so that they know you and they don’t forget about you. Okay, so that’s going to be step three. Gonna keep going. Okay, Daren, you’re muted, so I’m going to keep going step four.

Daren Phillipy  23:40

I’m sorry. I was saying some great stuff. I’m like, I missed it. Speechless. Lisa, you’re great. Keep on going. You’re killing it.

Lysi Bishop  23:52

Awesome. Market the tour physically. So when we talk about agents putting up 12 to 15 signs, and they don’t always do it. I think it’s crazy, because when I take that extra five or 10 minutes, the outcome is so much better. Put up those signs, put a lot of them up, then we call it seventh level is door knock, one of the most effective things I’ve ever done. It’s not hard, and I I just got asked by family reunion team. If I would do a door knocking panel at family reunion? I was like, No, I’m not the best out there. I don’t want to door knock as a cold door knocker with nothing to give them. I always want to offer value. And when I’m door knocking an open house, it’s very easy for me, because I’m door knocking value. You can either do it in the shape of a door knocker, or you can have a beautiful marketing piece, a piece of collateral. But I door knock and say, Hey, I know you love the neighborhood. Wanted to let you know that Susie and Bob are listing their home. Or you may have seen Susie and Bob sign go up. We’re having an open house this weekend. If you know anybody who may be interested, please send them on through. Here is a. The collateral here the here’s the information. Would love to see you there. You’ll know right away if somebody wants to enter into a conversation, or if they just want you off at their doorstep, and if they want me off their doorstep, I’m not going to go further to ask if they’ve ever considered selling. Is there anything we can do for them? Are they interested in a complimentary market analysis? No, you know that energy, but the goal of getting in front of people. It’s again, they get the opportunity to know you and reach out to you, sometimes, even if they’re cold and almost want to close the door on you. They come back to the open house and you remember them because you physically did the door knocking, and they are suddenly a little bit warmer. They see how you do things. They see that you’re not just a salesperson who’s only worried about themselves. They see that you care about them, and then on that second go around, suddenly they know you and they trust you more, and you can go further with that. So I love door knocking in a way that all I’m doing is inviting them for their friends you know, anybody you know might be interested in the neighborhood, or if you just want to take a peek inside to understand your values a little bit better, come on in. We’d love to see you. All I’m doing is giving. I don’t ask for anything immediately, unless that the energy allows me to so door knocking, I think again, it’s just so easy. And you can do 25 doors, and 30 doors, 50 doors, 100 doors, whatever you want. You can do it at a level that it fits in your schedule. Then we host the tour and my secret, or my method to my madness, is I am a on a DISC profile. I’m a high C personality. I’m a DC and my D barely, barely shadows my eye by like a hair. And so while I’m super driven, I can’t execute unless I fully understand everything. So it’s kind of a problem personality. But what I do is I make sure that when I walk into that open house, I know my comps. So I’ve either I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and I work in a fairly small regional area, and so I know most of the houses anyway. But if I don’t, I’m going to make sure I preview the houses. If they aren’t previewable, I’m going to go through the virtual tours, everything I can to be an expert, expert on the sales over the past six months, 12 months, two years, whatever you need in your market, and expert on the current inventory, expert on what’s coming up. So when you come into that house, I am the neighborhood expert, so that when, although I won’t know people’s names, I may not know that John Doe and Jane Doe. I may not know their names, but I know all about their house, and I’m able to provide information, because everybody who comes in knows more than I do. They just do their neighbors. I never correct them. I say, oh my gosh, that’s so interesting. And here’s what the data showed that, and here’s what I saw, and you all of a sudden become the expert, because although they know everything, they don’t really see the backside of it, and they don’t hear what you know when you were showing the house, what the feedback was, what you know, why it sold so low, it reeked of cat urine, and it was such a beautiful house, but it was going to take $50,000 to cut out The sheet rock, tear off the carpet, you know, get all that urine out of everything. And so those little bits of information help people understand why something sold too low, or why it’s sold very high. If it was a unicorn or something that was unmatched, it’s going to go at stellar numbers. So that’s, that’s it. It’s actually really simple. So so

Daren Phillipy  28:20

good, so good. I’ve got a ton of questions. I’m not going to get into it yet. I’m going to let that because I know these guys got questions. Is there you kind of flowed right into the listing side, which is perfect. Is there anything you need us to know about on the listing side that you do that’s unique or or anything like that?

Lysi Bishop  28:38

There’s so much. So I’ll keep it simple today, if we keep it as just the open house tour, and then the last thing that’s not on there is set a follow up plan. Make sure you have your CRM. Get a follow up plan. Don’t just end there. And that’s really it. But I think there’s so much I can answer any questions, and we can take it where it goes, but I want to make sure I stay focused.

Daren Phillipy  28:58

So good, so good. Let’s I want to spend, because you have a large team, and I want to talk, probably spend about 1010, maybe 15 minutes, talking about how you lead that team, what systems you use, or or who’s in charge. Like you said, your husband’s in charge of the back end, and you’re the My guess is the sales manager also help. Little bit about what systems you have and how you lead a team like that.

Lysi Bishop  29:28

Gosh, I think we’ve done everything wrong, and we learned from it to make it better. So I’m very driven, and I’m all about production. I mean, I’m high D and I’m Go, go, go, go, go. So I can be hard to work for because I am so driven, I speak fast, I speak in bullet points, and I am have the greatest of intentions, but I can be scary. I That’s why I said Daren, I’m not a team leader. I’m just like, I have a high level of energy, and it is always with good intention, but it can be perceived as being scary. So we. Know that we always need to give me a ying and a yang around me, somebody who’s going to be a softer side. And we went from being highly productive, we were all about production. We were always ramping up, always beating last year, and we switched. We put a different team in charge of culture, because we recognized we need to focus on culture. And we did a great job of focusing on culture. It was all about culture and making people feel good. And people felt good. What we missed in that two year time period was we had no aim for productivity, so our production went down. So there’s a balance in everything. It’s like a pendulum, almost like a market. We were too far for my 28 years of being in business on productivity. That’s just, that’s who I am and how I am. And then we went too far into culture, which was beautiful, like people loved that, you know, feeling good all the time. But if you don’t have accountability to the numbers, production, we’re sales people, that’s what we are. So we What

Daren Phillipy  31:04

did you do? Like, what did you learn from that? And how do you we’ve

Lysi Bishop  31:07

had a tough last few months. We recognize that the numbers weren’t working, and we’ve done a massive reorg over the last six months. And so it’s just really looking at the numbers, looking at where we needed to be, and keeping the focus on the two things that worked so well for us, productivity and culture, but marrying the two. And so it was a little bit painful, because it was a big reorg. I heard these stories over and over and over again from large Keller Williams teams, and thought, oh, I would never want to be in that spot. The outside world would never know it, but inside, we turned over a lot, and what we needed to bring back was making people feel good is great. But what we realized we did accidentally was we created, think about a square table, or a table for four when you go to a restaurant and that, pretend that table has four legs holding it up. And what we did is we created like separate legs of the business, and we got away from having a centralized pillar that was holding up the table. So usually when you go to a restaurant, there’s a centralized pillar, so you’re not going to knock your knees on those legs. We in this process of trying to make people feel good and make each department feel like it was all about them created like four different legs to hold up, rather than one company, one language. And what we realized is that we got a little bit away from productivity and away from being a team, and that teamwork is is truly who we are in our core. And everybody loved each other. We didn’t really even notice that. It was hard to see until we suddenly realized the marketing department was all about. The marketing department, the listing manager, like there was just, well, my they and so we, we had to, had to blow that up a little bit and then rebuild it so that we had a centralized we’re all in this that, you know, the legs might be skinnier if there’s four of them holding up the table, but when there’s one thick pillar in the middle, and we’re all for one, one for all. It really leads to great success, and that’s been where we have been most successful with our team. We just needed to add culture into that as one team, versus separating it out with different leaders and different teams and focusing on them within it. And the biggest change for us, or what we realized, is we were so good at creating unreasonable hospitality for our clients. What does that mean? It’s a will gadera book a restaurant owner that I think was 11 Madison Park in New York, is where he is claimed to fame was, and they went from being unknown to being the top 50 restaurants to being the number one restaurant on that scene, and were very successful in their hospitality, how they treated their customers, and when we look back to who we are, that is who we are. And we lost track of that, we lost sight of that, trying to build culture in our team. So we blew it up. We brought unreasonable hospitality back to our clientele, because during that time period I’ve never had, I don’t, we don’t usually get client complaints, a lot of client complaints saying things weren’t working. And I was like, Ooh, so we were able to get back to that, and we created our new culture. Is unreasonable. It’s one company, one language, unreasonable hospitality for your teammates. No, this is marketing. This is listing management. No, we’re all for one One for all and unreasonable hospitality for our clients, because we’ve always treated our clients with that little bit in this, in our bumpy stage, not so much, very short time period. And so once we have been able to get back to that, we’re now building off of that, and that’s a happy place. I mean, if you’re treating each other well, and you have an aim on productivity, making sure you’re hitting your numbers, and an aim on treating people very well within and on the outside, but the rest just comes.

Daren Phillipy  34:53

So one last question, I and, and we’re going to skip everything else because but I’m really interested. To miss, and then I’m going to let, I’m going to let you guys, by the way, all of you who have questions, I want you to raise your digital hands push that little button in the bottom. You guys can see it, it’s under, it’s under, it’s down there.

Lysi Bishop  35:14

Or raise your real hand, if that’s easier. Yeah.

Daren Phillipy  35:17

I like, I like them, knowing where it’s at. I want to know specifically how you blew it up, because a lot of times we hear this, so I had to blow it up and we fix this, or whatever.

Lysi Bishop  35:28

It’s tough conversation. It’s having tough conversations, and usually they will opt out for you. When you have the tough conversations and you have a vision of where you’re going, if they are not on board, they will give you notice. People want to it. Just so it was really having tough conversations with

Daren Phillipy  35:49

admin or with with your sales, or who were you talking to,

Lysi Bishop  35:54

what we had decided to do, and that change was to create a bunch of VPs of each department. So those legs were each VPS, and so it’s a matter of saying, here’s where we are, here’s where our numbers are, here’s where we need to change. And let’s, let’s rally together and do this, and then revisiting it every week in a really positive way will allow people to give you notice if they aren’t in agreement with you. So that is one of the easier ways to do it. If something’s really toxic, or if somebody’s really not performing, then it’s putting them on a formal Pip. But most of the time, if we are clear as kind I got off on a tangent there. If we’re clear with people, it might seem like we’re being mean, but clear is kind when you have very honest and clear conversations, people are able to either jump on the train and all head the same direction, or they’re able to get off the train with a great reference, a great experience, and it’s hard for all of those around you, because they don’t really understand what’s happening. And you don’t go in and say, here’s what the numbers look like. Here’s where this you just, you just love on the people who opt to go other direct, at least that’s what we did. We just love on them. We had great people. It all was on me. It wasn’t on them. We tried a new system, and I was behind it. I wasn’t orchestrating it, but I was behind it, saying, Yes, go. And it just took us a little longer to figure out that it wasn’t that simplifying, going back to our old ways was a little bit better. So it’s all on me. All those people were amazing, and it wasn’t anything that they were that there was nothing bad about them. So it was having that transparency of this is where we need to be. And for us, it was, you know, feasibly, if you want a company to be we spend a lot, you you all can see what my GCI is, and so we spend a lot to bring in that GCI, but you’ve got to maintain some profit, and when that’s not being maintained at a level that a business should be maintaining, then it’s time for tough conversations.

Daren Phillipy  37:58

Oh, good. I appreciate you letting me go a little bit. These are the things that I don’t want to go right past, because those are the challenges that the other big teams are dealing with. Is, is they see that the ship is going in a direction that didn’t they woke up one morning, morning, and all of a sudden you’re staring at something different that you didn’t realize. And how do you know

Lysi Bishop  38:22

how it happens? And like, I think we’ve had amazing people, so that makes it even harder when you have these amazing people and it’s like, Wait, where did we go and how do we get back? It’s hard. And so it just it’s, it is what it is. And we have to wake up every day with a positive attitude and be grateful for each of these people that have come in our lives, even if they leave we want to, you know, be I have gratitude for each one of them, and that that’s kind of how we made it through. It was coming through with a clear as kind honest perspective, having the conversations and having gratitude for every everybody. Every mistake I’ve made has made me better, stronger, more efficient. It’s everything has led to who we are and how we do it. So I view those as learning opportunities. And I think I probably had more mistakes than others, because I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and

Daren Phillipy  39:17

so good. I love it. So I’m going to open it up, the questions to anybody in the crew who has questions. There are no questions. I’ve got more, more to it. So I didn’t see any digital hands being raised. Did you guys not know where it’s at? Alright? So I’m going to, oh, there you go. Jay. Went off of vacation, and now all of a sudden he doesn’t know where, where the digital hand is. Okay, do your thing. Jay,

Speaker 1  39:41

no, this is the first time we weren’t able to use our real hands. I’m like, I’m a I love lazy because she’s like, just use your regular hand. I like that way to go, way to go.

Lysi Bishop  39:52

Listen, rogue on you. Daren, sorry, listen,

Jay Hendrix  39:55

he deserves it. So don’t worry about him. He deserves it. He’s He’s tough. So. So first of all, I want to say something. When you said that, you know, hard work goes through all markets. I’m telling our team all the time, hard work travels. It travels from this market to that market. That’s one thing that we all could do. So I appreciate your you saying that I’m going to snip that, and it’s going to be in our team meeting. I can see that coming up there so, but hey, what I really want to know is, you know, and it may just be markets, maybe I don’t know, but what we have found on on open houses is our attendance is much better with our system on Saturday than Sunday. How did you How did you land on Sunday? I agree with

Lysi Bishop  40:44

you that it’s market dependent, and if your market’s better on Saturday, Saturday it is. And for us, what we did is we were doing before we started the tour, we were doing half Saturday, half Sunday. Sunday was the better turnout. And so we switched to Sunday. Interestingly, in Boise, we are always stronger on Sunday. In our bedroom community, Saturdays can be a little bit better. And so on those dates we end up doing we now have pop ups and other things that we can do outside of it, but we still are Sunday open house tour that branded consistent tour is always Sunday one to four, and it’s because it was strongest in our area, one to four,

Speaker 1  41:20

that was the next question I was going to ask. Just gonna ask. Just, just see what I’m really, I’m really into that us being having that same thing where we do the same thing all the time. So I appreciate that. Yeah, so I’ll let Laura Go. Now. She’s really the best one of the group here. Sorry, Daren, but anyway, we’ll let Laura go. Next

Daren Phillipy  41:37

Great question. Jay, um, Laura, you are apparently the best person here,

Speaker 1  41:42

right? No, I was just, I heard you mention a couple times Lacey about the your luxury concierge, and I was just wondering if you could touch a little bit more about exactly what that is. So

Lysi Bishop  41:55

I came to Boise when our average sales price, I think it was 82,000 but when I bought my house, before I became a realtor, it was like 62,000 I don’t remember exactly where it was, but I bought 1991 and I became a real estate agent here in 1994 and so we did not have a luxury market. If you had a high level executive that built an upper end home in one of these fancy neighborhoods, they might have spent like 500,000 on it, or 700,000 on it, and they couldn’t sell it for that to save it its life. So homes, if you built a luxury home, you knew that you were either it’s gonna be a legacy home, you’re gonna pass down your kids, or you would sell it as a loss. We just did not have a luxury market. This goes back to the work ethic before I knew I didn’t have a kW teaching me anything, and what I knew my background was in retail sales, and how I was wired was what will goodera described so well in unreasonable hospitality. That was just my personality. I always wanted to exceed everybody’s expectations. So way, way back when, like we’re talking 1994 with dot matrix printers, dial up internet and two computers for an entire office. You went to a workroom to use it. I would go do my open house. I would learn what people wanted. I would go back to the office, get on dial up. Cha ching ching ching, boom, boom, boom, get these things. Then I would find the properties that met their needs, print them on a dot matrix printer. I tear the sides off of it. I would put them in the folder for the company I was with, and I would drive to their house and put it on their doorstep like you didn’t email people back then. So that was unreasonable hospitality. I listened to what they wanted. They shared it with me. They gave me their address to follow up, and then I just popped by and I would put it on their doorstep, or I’d knock on the door if they aren’t there. I’d put it on the doorstep, and then I would call them to say, Hey, I just zipped back to the office after and dropped this off, and that was luxury service that was something that they didn’t have to ask me for. They didn’t expect, and I exceeded their expectations. I was 12 years old. No, I was 24 years old. So I was young. And at that point in time, real estate agents weren’t young. It was not a profession for younger people. So when I would be at open houses, people would literally pat me on the shoulder, like, Oh, Hi, honey. Yeah, I’ll be working with your mom. My mom doesn’t live in Boise, Idaho, but it was not people didn’t. And by the way, I was pregnant and had a one year old at home, so people didn’t take me seriously unless I found ways to exceed their expectations. It was more knowledgeable than anybody else, and I provided a higher level of service. So somehow, I was very lucky in that some old boiseans decided to work with me. Why? Because I was so responsive and took such great care of them. So it would be people think I’m from here or think I’m. Very social. And, know, people remember, I’m a DC, I’m not an I, so I don’t want to go to a party, I don’t want to socialize, I don’t want to do a pop by and bring them a pumpkin. That is just not in my personality. So I had to learn how I could succeed. And so with that, it was, you know, I just, I just worked, and I got in with these people, and then they referred me. It was all repeat and referral. And so I then later, when Boise started to grow and we started to have, I mean, when I started our title company would do a monthly report, an annual report, I think there was one sale over $500,000 each year, like it was painfully low. So being able to serve at a high level without any expectations other than this is what I do, and I want to be successful at it. I was able to create that luxury level of service, which when I go back to simplicity, that’s what I do now. And so when I have a $5 million listing and somebody wants I just want to exceed their expectations and find out what they need and how I can serve and how I can just be authentic for them and and I want to make sure I map out what their needs are so I can be sure to follow up. That’s perfect. Thank you.

Daren Phillipy  46:12

Awesome. Thank thanks. Laura, great. Great question. Ivy, it is your turn coming out of She comes to us from her library. Hi, Ivy,

Lysi Bishop  46:23

hi. How are you very well, thanks for being here.

Daren Phillipy  46:27

Oh yeah, absolutely, I was going to tell Jay, well, wait a minute, I’m here for the best person who’s like, oh, wait, okay, um, you know, I had a debate. I know definitely yes. That is right. Yeah, that is right. I had a debate on which question to ask. I know we don’t have much time, but I guess I’m going to go with. One of the things I’m interested in hearing about is you mentioned one of the things you’re doing this year was ramping up your agents. So I’m interested in hearing how you want are going to implement that, like, what’s your implementation plan? And how do you I mean, where do they come from? I mean, what do you guys plan on doing? Because it’s not like agent good agents fall from the trees.

Lysi Bishop  47:12

So what we want to go with is we really want to have agents who we can train to give a high level of service. Our highest level of success is getting people who are the right personality profile, and we can teach them the rest if we get somebody who doesn’t have good habits, somebody who does not believe in unreasonable hospitality, knowledge, care for the client, even if they have 20 years in business, it doesn’t work. We’ve tried this. We’ve done it over and over and over again, and it is finding people who match our personality profile. So we actually use culture index, and it’s from EO systems. And with culture index, you and I don’t know where they are, but you could always look up culture index and you take a class, it’s $2,000 I think I may be off on this. And then you have free culture index surveys from there on in. So when we want to hire for something success, team or agent, we first define what that that what the person we’re looking for. Here’s the role, and it spits out a profile. It’s just dots on a graph. It’s a, b, c, d, versus D, i, s, c, and out of that, it actually they’ll help you write your ads. And we’re looking for a certain profile. So as those resumes start coming in, there is a profile before anything else that’s like, got it, for example, I you know, whatever they are, so whatever that might be. So that’s what we’re looking for. And then we’re looking to train them and having maybe such a strong C what we’ve tried in the past that has not been successful when we’ve given leaders the opportunity to say, bring them on. Let’s see how it goes. When we were not super organized and had everything spelled out, it didn’t work. So we’ve tried and failed at different methods, and what we’ve learned works. Is excellent training, excellent accountability. So what are our systems and standards? How are we going to train to them? How are we going to hold accountable to that has been our success. So we have a clear goal. We are going to bring on one to four agents a quarter. If there isn’t somebody who is the right person, maybe we don’t bring underneath that quarter. And what we’re doing is we are looking for a right fit. Just because I like somebody does not necessarily mean that they’re the right fit. And I’m a driver, I’m a really hard worker to a fault like I am. I’m a people say you’re a workaholic. I love what I do. I love real estate, I love serving the client. But that’s not going to be the way that everybody wants to work. So we want people who it’s in their DNA, whatever that, whatever they want to do, that we are right fit for them, using culture index. And then each quarter we’re gonna have a q1, q2, q3, q4, class that our VP of sales and our trainer, Cynthia, who’s. On the org chart. She has your first 30 days when they come in, the first 30 days they’re in office, five days a week, from eight to five so they can get their training. After that, they don’t need to be in office. But she has a full training mapped out. And we’ve had our first class go through. That was q4 we have our second class starting today, so we have it all mapped out. We’ll see how it works, and then we’re going to inspect what we expect. Nar says for every new agent, you’re going to have 75% attrition.

Daren Phillipy  50:30

Makes sense. So

Lysi Bishop  50:34

go ahead, we hope that we’re going to keep four out of four, or three out of three, and we understand that we’d be beating all statistics. So we’re on a we’re working it right now. We have our business plan, then we’re going to inspect what we expect, see what worked and what didn’t, and we’ll pivot from

Daren Phillipy  50:48

there, yeah, and it makes sense. I My question just and I know we’re right. We only have one minute, so one minute, real quick, Daren, so what I heard was that you guys do ads, right? So, I mean, I heard all the personality, and I’ll take a look at that culture. You’re very much into your systems, which is awesome, like sounds like you’re dialed in. Is it just as you’re running or are you utilizing other things to find people or people coming to you? We

Lysi Bishop  51:15

do quarterly masterminds, and so people can come, and they come to us. What we use the most of is our market center is amazing. We’re in very close contact with our market center. So when people come to them, saying, I want to join a team, they say, you would probably be a good fit for Lisa Bishop interview them. And so there’s a big team here, different style than us, called city of trees. So our market center, I think does a great job. They they’ll say, city of trees might be a great fit for you, or very different style, Alicia Bishop might be a great fit. We interview, and when we interview people, we’re not the right place for them. We give back to the market center. People do find us, because we have so many listings. You can go on our website. They could say, join our team. So I do get a lot of emails that just say, I want to go in real estate. Would you interview me? And then we we’ve tried to give them back to our market center, and our market center gives them to us when they’re fit dependent. So I love what our market center does for us.

Daren Phillipy  52:10

Oh, that that’s awesome, because it’s one of the things that you know. I know Daren utilizes as well. So I was just wondering, because it’s always, how do you find the people, right? Because there’s a mix. It’s not just you go in one spot, so it’s just spot. So just wondering what you did. So thank you for answering my questions. I didn’t mean to take us over. You are Ivy. Love your questions. I love you being here and Lisa, you were fantastic. I You’re we’ve had a handful of them. You were definitely one of them that just scratched the service. I’m killing myself because I’m like, we do not have the time to be able to spend time asking you all the stuff that we need to learn from you. So don’t be surprised if, in a year and a half, I beat on your door again and said, Lisa, you talked a lot about about this experience, and I need to learn

Lysi Bishop  52:58

more about it. So you’re so cool. I’m going to family reunion. If you guys are not doing family reunion and mega camp, I think they’re really powerful. See you there. I’m on a luxury panel, and I’m on an Open House panel, surprise, surprise. And so love to see you guys there. And Daren, anytime you need anything for the rest of you, go to Lisa bishop.com sign up for that open house tour so you can see a model to draw from. And I wish everybody the best. Happy New Year. Thanks for being here. I love it. Lisa,

Daren Phillipy  53:27

real quick before you bounce because I know that was your sign out and I’m out. There’s people that want to send referrals to you. What’s the best way for them to send referrals to

Lysi Bishop  53:35

you? You can either use Lisi, at least bishop.com, l y, s, I, at, l, y, s, i, b, I, S, H, O, p.com, or info. I’m a part of that group. If you go on our website, you try to email me. It goes to info, at least bishop.com and I’m on that distribution group. So if you had questions for me, use either one of those email accounts. My EA does check email. It all goes through her Daren knows this, and it does eventually make its way up to me. And I always, I believe in Keller Williams culture. I always do everything I can to contribute.

Daren Phillipy  54:13

You are amazing. Three gold stars, two happy smiley faces, and I’m really grateful we’re friends.

Lysi Bishop  54:21

Yeah, thank you so much. Have a good day. Happy New Year Bye Bye. Happy New Year bye bye. Thank you.