What are you doing right now to help you succeed in the long run? Join your host Bill Risser as he talks with Todd Schroth about elevating real estate standards. Todd has spent the last 20 years vested in the Orlando Real Estate market by helping others buy, sell, and invest while standing alongside investing himself. He shares his journey in this industry and dives deep into why coaching is crucial for business success. He loves educating people and helping them reach their full potential, even if it means that person can search for other job opportunities outside of his company. He also discusses creating solid teams, recognizing strengths, and nurturing opportunities. Learn how to build a better business!

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Todd Schroth, Schroth Team Brokered By eXp Realty

This is episode 325. Thank you so much for tuning in. As always, thank you for telling a friend. We are going over to Orlando. That's where Todd Schroth and his team with eXp. He has been in the business his entire life. As soon as he got out of high school, he was right into real estate. His family has got a history of it. I love these stories. They are quite different. A big shout out to Anthony for telling me that this is the guy I needed to talk to. He was absolutely right. Thanks, Anthony. Let's get this thing started. Todd, welcome to the show. Bill, thanks for having me here. I'm looking forward to sharing. You have a huge fan in Tampa. Did you know that? That's why I'm excited to be here because he's talking nothing but crazy stuff about this guy, Bill Risser and I was like, “Who is this guy?” We had a nice conversation. I can't wait to get your story here. We will get this thing going. You are in Orlando doing great things in the real estate world. You have been there a long time. Are you a native Floridian or did you escape the cold somehow? The family wanted to get down and escape the cold. My mom, back in high school, was like, “Want to move to Florida?” I was like, “Sure.” I was sixteen years old. We drove down. We have been down here ever since. You moved in the middle of high school. How was that? It’s my junior year of high school. I went to a private school here, which was funny because sitting in the hall, on the first day of class, somebody walks up to me and was like, “Todd?” He was somebody I went to sixth grade with that moved down here as well. It was perfect. You had someone right away and that was cool. Looking at your history. It's pretty interesting that you are one of the unicorns on the podcast. That's a good thing. You've only worked in real estate. From day one out of school, this is what you've done. Talk about the very beginning. I graduated high school and got signed up for college. I had one job besides real estate and was eighteen years old. Going back to the days of fax machines, I was in the bookstore doing something and saw a piece of paper on the school's fax and it said, “Computer sales.” Let me go check it out. It was an ad they sent over. I went and checked it out. I got the job and did that for a year. Basically, I was 17, 18 years old doing that. A buddy of mine from high school ran into me at the computer store and he's like, “We are buying real estate and doing this stuff.” I was like, “It sounds interesting. Let's talk further about it.”   [bctt tweet="If you want to be a great leader, bring your team where they can be successful as well. They could be successful agents on their own. " username="billrisser"]   At nineteen years old, I get involved in the real estate industry and I'm a second-generation real estate. My mom has been selling for 55 years. My dad, my stepdad, and my step-mom, all had real estate licenses. My sisters both had real estate licenses. My brother is a custom builder. My wife got her license. It is the family business. Our dinner conversations at Thanksgiving were about what was going on with the markets. At nineteen years old, I bought my first investment property. I didn't have my real estate license but I was doing the investment stuff. I was like, “Let's give it a shot.” We had private capital tobacco. It obviously made it easier to buy without having to save up back then $16,000 to buy our first house. Back then, it was $16,000 at 18% was our loan. I was buying a lot of real estate with 18% money and cashflowing all of it. Now, you buy something with 6% and I'm like, “Can you cashflow it?” The price is all relative to the rate that's sitting out there. I did the investment stuff for about 5 to 25 years. I got burnt out. I had a lot of rental properties, stuff we were managing, and flips we were doing. At the same time, I opened up a telemarketing company. I ran that for about 3 or 4 years and had a manager in place. I wasn't like physically involved every day. When I quit real estate investments and got into the management of the hands-on, I hated it. I hated working with people. I did it for about six months and said, “I'm done. I'm going back into real estate.” I shut the company down. We sold it to our manager. We got into the real estate side. I got my license and right into sales. How do you find your first client? Go after the market you were working on before. I was listing investment properties. The staff was doing, “We will buy your house cash,” ads. If they didn't buy it, I would go in there as a listing and say, “They didn't want to give you enough money. That was my first listing appointment was someone who didn't buy their house. You had a solid ten years after that first purchase at nineteen. Your experience starts building on investment stuff until the time you become a residential real estate agent. For five years we did investments. For the last several years have been involved in real estate. You are 25, 26 years old talking to probably people a bit older than you about investing in real estate. How did that go? When you flip or fix, or work on 800 properties more or less, you have a lot of knowledge that you are spitting out at them. Growing up in the industry, I had knowledge of the whole process because we have been on the floats, in the offices, and all kinds of things with our parents. We were basically going through that with them. I do feel bad for the kids that are getting their licenses now at 19, 20, and 21. I love working with those people because I want to give them the knowledge that I had to help them get started. When you started running your own operation, would you hire young guys or women that had something about them that you knew that they were going to be successful? How did that work? We had an agent walk into my office about new agents and I was like, “The beauty of new agents is I can't teach an old dog new tricks.” If I had an agent coming to me who want to work on our team, who has been in the business 10, 15 years, I can't get all their bad habits out of them but I can take a brand-new agent and train them and give them the exact path to go forward with. When I go into coaching and I'm like, “I want to revamp my stuff.”   [caption id="attachment_4357" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Coaching: We can't get all their bad habits out of them, but we can take a brand new agent, train them, and give them the exact path to go forward.[/caption]   What do I do? I always go back to my old habits and do things the way they were, even though the other system is better. Even though I can show that agent who has been doing this for twenty years who doesn't have the success level they should, the path to go forward. That's the correct way to do it. They still go back to the old habits. If I can take you, Bill, as a brand-new agent and get it going, you are going to have the right path going forward. I love new and young agents because they are right out of school and aggressive. They want to make money. Hungry is a good word. You started with RE/MAX and were with RE/MAX for a long time. I went right for the best office. I knew I wanted to end up there. I was at another office for two weeks and the day I was supposed to be my floor time, I quit. If I'm going to give up a lot of my commission, I might as well go right to RE/MAX where I'm going to make 100% or 95% of the time. All I wanted to go to that office for was sales training. I already knew real estate but I needed sales skills. That's why I was going to the first office. When I was looking at the numbers, I've always played with the numbers. How can I make more money? I went right to RE/MAX and signed up with them. I was there for eighteen years. Obviously, we ended up at eXp Realty a few years ago. When you start thinking about margins at age nineteen, that changes your whole life. If you think about it, I looked at the sheet when I was signing up. I'm like, “First $30,000. I give them $15,000,” but it costs me $1,000 a month to work at RE/MAX so twelve times $1,000 is $12,000. I'm ahead. $3,000 there. Why don't I go right to the source? Think about this, in 2000, things are starting to explode when it comes to social, everything online, the Web 2.0, we are talking back and forth. I'm going to get a wild guess here. You probably embraced that as a young guy and ran with online leads and all that great stuff. Everybody was trying to figure it out. All the people were coming over to our office showing us stuff. We had our websites. We were able to play with it. We got it from the company. When one of the trainers was in, I was like, “I closed half my business with your site last year.” They are like, “I would love a testimonial.” Now there are 120 million online leads and 5 million houses sold. There were 1 million houses sold and probably 500 online leads sold but nobody picked up the phone. The lead comes in and I call them up and ask them, “You inquired about 123 Elm Street. Would you like to take a look at that?” “We are coming down next week from Massachusetts, whatever.” That was the business. That's where we are getting it from. Wherever we had to spend money on commercials or marketing, we would do that. That was going to get attention but it wasn't as abused as it is now. It’s a lot harder. It's changed dramatically. I remember when the first IDX feed came out and a buddy of mine in Phoenix’s blog website thing went from 500 pages to 50,000 pages because we had a listing that was huge back then. Now, it means nothing. Everybody has that. IDX is IDX. You got to click it on the MLS and it's going to Realtor.com. When someone says, “I put your house on over 500 websites,” I'm like, “All you have to do is to click a button and it automatically does that.   [bctt tweet="You cannot be afraid to have your highest producer leave the team because that means you’re holding them hostage. You have to help them grow. " username="billrisser"]   It wasn't that hard anymore. You have had a team for a long time. I'm trying to think about when teams became involved. I feel like it was around 2010-ish or maybe right before the dark days. How about you? When did you start building it? There's still got to be some lessons you learn that you can pass along to someone reading. I didn't quite understand the team concept back when I first got into the business. Teams were in my office. There was a team in 2000 or 2001. My mom was like, “Go be a buyer's agent.” I'm like, “I'm thinking assistant. I don't want to be somebody’s assistant. I want to work for myself. I don't want to be underneath Bill Risser or whatever. I want to be my own agent. I don't want to be an assistant.” I'm not thinking of a buyer's agent as someone who's getting the opportunities, going out, and closing them. I had the wrong mentality then but this is 2000, 2001. This is like Janice was putting the team stuff together but the teams did come around in late 2010. When 2008 came around, short sale days, obviously say the dark clouds came over us, we were carrying 25 to 30 listings. It's a lot maintaining those and keeping up on the short sales. We did our own negotiating. Some we leveraged out but it wasn't stuff that was all selling right away. You got to keep in touch with the sellers but buyers were also calling to buy properties. I'm getting married. We've got our kids. I'm not wanting to go run around twelve hours a day showing houses as I did in 2007 and earlier because I was single. I didn't care. I will work 24/7. It was a way to find time and freedom. I still work seven days a week and as much as we needed to but it was a lot of missed opportunities if I didn't have a buyer's agent in play at that point. The sign calls that we were getting, keeping, and nurturing those opportunities. Was it the same setup now? A certain split if it was referred from you or a different split, was all that in play already? No. Back then, it was called a one split for everything that was going on. We shared business and were like business partners. I consider the buyer's agent. I had an assistant who's still with me now, who was running my company now. Longevity is what we have in our team. Treat them right and they stay with you forever. We continue to treat people right. We only give so much because we've got people that take and take. You got to go back and forth but it wasn't run like a business. It's like, “A lead came in, let's go close it.” We never thought about payrolls, splits, the hard cost, and what things look like. I was like, “That split was not profitable. I don't know why I did that.” I didn't think about the breakdown of what was that 40% or 50% we were getting at the time. Through different coaching over the last few years, we've got it running more like a business. I've got four people on the payroll. It was even scary enough for me to go to Paychex and do a direct deposit. I did that a few years ago. They would get checks to me handwritten and the bank would have to call to ask what the amount was. I felt like I was at the next level having paychecks with direct deposit. We have four assistants in the office. We've got fifteen agents working for us. I've got a huge brick and mortar space where we all work in the office. We do have virtual assistants as well. We've got three of those in the Philippines. My closing coordinator has a virtual assistant helping her with transactions. My marketing coordinator has a virtual assistant. My director of operations has one. They have help. I love people in the office because I can fire everybody and probably hire twenty people for what I pay them. I love having people in the office because I can see, hear, and know what they are doing. They have assistants because they are able to work on them. Your office door is open. You can hear what's going on. I did that in the title space. I ran a branch for a number of years and I loved having my door open and listening to issues. Sometimes there are issues in the title side of things. Did you know that? I thought it was you guys who got the papers because you make the least amount of money in a transaction and you get all the BS. I was like, “$400 to close the deal.”   [caption id="attachment_4358" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Coaching: Real estate is a way to find time and freedom. You have to nurture those opportunities.[/caption]   You are spot-on, sir. Thank you very much for bringing that up. I appreciate it. I need $1,000 for this event we have going on. Can you give me some more marketing money? I will let that sit out there a little bit and let everybody kick in. That's perfect. You talked about coaching. You receive coaching. You believe in coaching. You are a coach. You love educating other people. First, I'm going to say why, and second, let's talk about the genesis, the start of agents who win because that's cool. I never thought about coaching. I was going to look at coaching back when I got started and the coaching was Mike Ferry’s system, pick up the phones and prospect. I’m like, “I don't like talking to people. I don't want to pick up the phones.” I never got involved in coaching at the beginning of my career. I always thought it was people smiling and dialing, and that was not my method of business. Come around 2010 and ‘11, I got into the coaching side with Donna and Mike Stott with Your Coaching Matters. I was with them for seven years. Like the brokerage, I don't coach hop. How can we help each other? I outgrew what they had going on and then got into a couple of different other platforms. Now, I have been with three different coaching companies over the last few years. Each one has offered us a different level of experience, information or knowledge that we've gained from them. The last three that we've had have helped us transition more to the business model versus like, “Go sell houses and we will see what happens at the end.” Now, it's all about profit. Every day we are looking at CTE and what the splits are on each deal. The agents that are on the team, if they are not producing, had a conversation, “If you are not selling houses but most brokers are pushing you out because this is a transition time. This is when money is being made in real estate. Pick up the phones.” There are also different kinds of coaching that I've learned about. Back then, obviously, I always thought coaching was picking up the phone, smiling, and dialing. That's not it. The different types of coaching we have to look for is we want to get leadership coaching, accountability coaching, prospecting coaching, sales coaching, team leadership coaching, and business coaching. We've formulated what our business model is and what we want our splits to be. It's a matter of, we have a coach on recruiting, how can we bring more agents to the team of the company? We have a coach on systems who are helping us work our backend. They are also helping us with our training for the agents, providing the systems for that. The next coach that I'm looking for is leadership. “How can I become a better leader?” Those are the things that you can either take a class in college and learn there or you have life experiences and go back and teach them. The coaching that I'm providing is to my agents and helping them become better agents and training. Let's transition into agents who win. Trying to figure out a platform to deliver from, and I don't use it for attraction. I don't use it for anything, except it's a value to give back. It's a small Facebook group. That's Agents Who Win on Facebook and