How To Build A Brand In A Community You're Not From

Jamie Tulak: A lot of the other stuff was the business building blocks to get to that next level. All of that, retargeting for me was the cherry on top. I was still doing postcards to my neighborhood. I was farming, the traditional way of farming. I was still doing fun events. I still do fun events in my neighborhood. I do golf cart parades and the community yard sale and the monster match dash, those types of things, the Christmas lights contest. I was already doing those types of things, even though I was brand new. 

Tim Chermak: This is The Platform Marketing Show, where we interview the most creative and ambitious real estate agents in the country, dissect their local marketing strategy, and get the behind the scenes scoop on how they're generating listing leads and warm referrals. We'll dive into the specifics of what marketing campaigns are working for them, how much they're spending on those campaigns, and figure out how they have perfected what we call the Platform Marketing strategy. This is your host, Tim Chermak. I'm the founder and CEO of Platform. I love marketing and I talk too much, so let's dive in.

Tim Chermak: Hey guys, it's Tim Chermack, Max Rymer, and we wanna welcome you back to The Platform Marketing Show. We're joined today by Jamie Tulak. Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie Tulak: Thank you.

Tim Chermak: What we're going to be talking about this morning is how to build a brand in a community you're not from. I think anyone who's been in real estate for longer than two weeks knows that if you're born and raised in an area and you're lucky enough to still be living there and selling real estate there, you have a huge, huge advantage over agents that are not originally from that area. You just take for granted the way that a fish isn't aware that it's in water. You take for granted all of the social connections and family connections and the people that you don't even know but your family knows. Because your family knows someone, they know you by default. You kind of borrow the credibility of your mom or your dad and the reputation that they have maybe built in a community. If you're not from an area and you move somewhere, you have none of that. You don't have a percentage of that. You don't have 50% of that or 20% of that. You have none of that. 

Tim Chermak: So, Jamie has built an incredibly, incredibly successful real estate business in the Holly Springs area of North Carolina. She's originally from California. You may know her from Girls with Grit, but we're actually not really gonna talk about Girls with Grit today. We're gonna talk about everything that came before that, how Jamie built a really successful real estate business and how she's still running a successful real estate business using the principles that obviously she teaches at Girls with Grit. So Jamie, let's go back in time. I know you were born and raised in California. My apologies. 

Jamie Tulak: Yep. I'm not there anymore though, so don't hold it against me. 

Tim Chermak: You're a refugee, not a missionary. So, you moved from California to North Carolina. What prompted the move? How long did you live in California? Just kind of give us your backstory of how you ended up in North Carolina and we’ll go from there.

Jamie Tulak: Yeah. I'll totally share my story. I'll make it short. I'll give you the shorter version. I went to Fresno State, graduated with a degree in interior design, and I went to go work for a custom home builder thinking it was a sales job, or a design job. It was actually sales and I actually liked it. I'm like, wow, I'm actually really good at this. This is fun. So, I ended up going to get my license. I went resale and my first year in real estate, I ended up selling close to 35 houses. You know, brand new baby agent, which was great. It was in a down market, so this was back in 2010 or something like that. 

Tim Chermak: Okay, so this is back near Fresno?

Jamie Tulak: Yeah, so I was raised in Hanford. I lived in the Hanford-Lemoore area, which is a suburb of Fresno. But yeah, that's where I sold real estate, built my business from the ground up. About five years into it, my husband ended up getting licensed and joined me. So, I retired him from the corporate world for the first time and we built our little mini empire. People refer to us as Chip and Joanna Gaines of that small community of Lemoore, California. It was so much fun, y'all.

Max Rymer: Not a bad moniker, right? 

Jamie Tulak: No, not at all. I was there for it for sure because we had a retail design storefront, like a cute little storefront, we sold to Magnolia [brand] storefront. [The whole company…]

Tim Chermak: Okay. I have to stop you here because you're on a roll, but I need to clarify something here. You sold 35 homes in your first year as an agent. I don't want to gloss over that because there's a lot of agents who might have been in real estate for seven, eight, nine, 10 years and they've never sold 35 homes in a year. What lead sources or marketing strategies, or what did you do to sell 35 homes in your very first year? 

Jamie Tulak: Back then it was about– I think part of it was my age demographic. There was a lot of first time homebuyers getting in the market then because houses were affordable in my market back then. You could get a nice starter home, three bed, two bath, for $100,000, $150,000 back then. That's obviously not the case now. It was just my age demographic, being in my early 20s and seeing a lot of people alongside me getting married and ready to start a family and buy a house and all of that. So, I think that was part of it is just who my sphere was at that time and being ready to dive into the housing market. 

Jamie Tulak: And then the second piece of it was networking. Networking with lots of local lenders and just hustling. I mean, I hate to say hustle culture, but listen, there's some point in your career where you freaking have to. You have to work really, really hard to build a brand and you don't have the luxury of saying, “No, I'm not going to work weekends. No, I'm not going to work evenings.” It's just reality. When you get into real estate, you have to be ready to go all in and work a crap ton in order to build a business that you're proud of. So, it was a lot of networking. 

Tim Chermak: I've said that on many podcasts and many key notes I've given at conferences that, honestly, marketing doesn't really matter until you get to about 25 to 30 closings a year. Everything up until that is just hustle. Marketing can help you go from 30 to 50 or 30 to 60 or whatever, but everything up to 25, 30, if you can't sell 25, 30 homes a year without Facebook ads or Zillow or whatever, you need to address that first. 

Jamie Tulak: Yeah, that's the thing. I wasn't running any ads at all. I used social media organically back then. That was before anybody was. You'd had the older agents in the office– older, which is funny because I'm their age now. 

Tim Chermak: These are super old agents that were totally irrelevant. They were like 38 years old and just ancient.

Max Rymer: Well, and back then too Jamie, you were probably noticing that when you did post organically, you were actually reaching new people without paying for it. 

Jamie Tulak: So different than it is now. But yeah, that was the old Facebook. There was an agent in my office, she was probably in her mid 50s, and she said at a sales meeting, “Are we using the same Facebook? I don't understand how you're getting results and I’m not.” Bless her.

Max Rymer: She was on Facebook.net at the time. 

Tim Chermak: I mean, honestly, back then, 2012, 2013, 2014, I was doing marketing consulting for local small businesses at the time. I remember one of the things I would do is I would order vinyl stickers to have them put on their front door that said, “Like us on Facebook.” Back then, how many likes you had actually mattered.

Jamie Tulak: It mattered back then.

Tim Chermak: If you had 500 likes or 1,000 likes or whatever, Facebook would actually show your post to more people. Now, it is actually completely irrelevant how many likes you have. 

Jamie Tulak: Honestly, it was like a lot of the, “Just listed. Just sold. Going on a listing appointment. Staging this house,” just showing the behind the scenes before that was the thing that everyone was doing. I was doing that back then. That's really how I built my business and built a brand. But yeah, so we had the home staging company too. We would stage our listings. We would stage for other agents. We had the retail design storefront, and then I had a team at that point but I had a toddler at my knees and a baby on my hip. I remember thinking, there is no way that this is what God had for my life because I was stressed out. 

Jamie Tulak: I was wearing so many different hats. I was trying to be a mom and trying to be a wife and trying to be a business owner and trying to grow these businesses. I just was very unhappy with the way things were going in California and I thought there is no way I can raise my kids here. I looked at my husband one day and I said, “Something has to give.” I remember just crying, looking at him. “Something has to give. This is not how we're supposed to live our life. There's no way this is what God has for us because this is not of him at all.” 

Tim Chermak: At this time, just to be clear, you're very successful and you're making very good money, right? 

Jamie Tulak: Yeah, from the outside looking in, I was selling over 80, 90 houses a year. I had a very established brand. I had the staging company, the storefront. We had our team. Anyone from the outside looking in would go, “Man, she has it all,” but y'all, I was tired. I was just so tired of trying to build these businesses. I thought, there's got to be a better way. There's just no way that this is what God has for me. Through tears and lots of prayer over that week, we decided to shut the shop down and ironically, we had a line all around the block of people wanting to come and shop. I'm like, where were you people the last six months? 

Jamie Tulak: Anyway, so my husband tells me, “Just stay home. Don't come in,” because that was my baby. He's like, “I know you're really heartbroken over this dream of having the shop and it just didn't work out the way we had planned.” After that week, we shut the shop down. The following week, we said, “Let's really look at what does our dream life look like. Where do we want to really plant roots? Where do we want to really pour into a community? Where do we want to raise our kids? Where do we see ourselves for the next 20 years?” At that point, my son was four years old, so it was before he was in kindergarten. We thought long and hard, prayed about it. 

Jamie Tulak: We always wanted to move to Raleigh. My husband originally went to UNC Wilmington for the first two years of college before he went into the Navy. The only reason why I met my husband is because he was stationed at the Navy base right there in the Lemoore-Hanford area where I grew up until we met. He's from the East Coast. He loved the coastal North Carolina area and I thought, where could we move? His sister originally lived in the Raleigh area and I had visited at one point and I loved it. I told him– this is before we got married, I told him if we ever got married and had kids, I'd love to move to Raleigh. So it was back on the table, prayed over it, and said, “God, if this is for us, open the doors.” 

Jamie Tulak: To make the extremely long story short, that's exactly what we did. We planned our exit strategy. This was June of 2018, finally, planned our exit strategy over one year. You guys know in real estate, you say one word about moving and people freak out and you lose all this business. We were really quiet about it, planned it, was very strategic about it, and then June of 2019, we relocated to Raleigh. Here I am five and half years later, I've never looked back. 

Jamie Tulak: So then, I had to do what I did the first time, but you know what? It was faster this time around because I knew what I needed to do. I knew all the right steps I made and I knew how to build a brand successfully. I was like, I've already done it. At that point, I wasn't afraid. I'm like, listen, I'm not a tree. I can pick up and move. I had to have faith. There was this sign, I actually have it on my office here and I look at it every day and I live by this. It's “Always do what you're afraid to do.” I live faith over fear. That's just what we decided to do. It's funny. My husband, looking back now, he looks at me and says, “You were the most fearless person I have ever met.” I'm like, what's there to be afraid of? You fail? Okay. Pick something else up. Try something else. 

Jamie Tulak: But yeah, and so we moved in. The first six months I was here, I did all the things I knew I needed to do to meet the right people, to network, to have coffee meet ups, to go to the ribbon cuttings, to drive around and understand my new area. How am I supposed to be an expert in this area if I don't know the school districts, the neighborhoods? What makes this community tick? I spent six months, and very intently, learning everything I needed to know. What were the quirks of the school district? What are the nice shops and restaurants that people care about here? How do I go meet those people and let them know that I'm new here, that I want to support their business? Honestly, it's the whole basis of 5 Mile Famous that I talk about a lot. We have a course on it and teach on that, but that's exactly what I did. I got into the trenches and just met people. I think the other thing that was in my favor, so that was 2019. Obviously, everyone knows what happened in 2020. 

Tim Chermak: It was June 14th, 2019.

Jamie Tulak: That’s right. I did tell you that.

Tim Chermak: I remember I texted you and I was like, “Hey, when did you move to North Carolina because we just wrote a retargeting ad that mentioned you moving to North Carolina. It's running on your Facebook page.” You texted back– it really surprised me. You texted back the specific day, June 14th, 2019. I was like, okay, clearly this was a very big deal in your life that you remember the literal specific day that you moved from California to North Carolina. One observation I guess that I wanna make is that when you move somewhere, if you're new to a community, you don't have any of the social connections that we talked about that you had–

Jamie Tulak: I didn’t know anyone.

Tim Chermak: In California, you knew people and your family knew people, etc. You will eventually get back there. It'll just take time. If you move somewhere, I would say it'll probably take five years, if you just let it organically happen, it'll eventually take you five years, but you're like, “Hey, how do I compress that learning phase to six months rather than five years because I don't wanna wait five years to build up a network and know people and know the school districts and the restaurants. I want this to happen quickly.” 

Tim Chermak: If you're listening to this podcast episode right now and maybe you were born and raised in the market you're in but your business isn't where you want it to be, what if you adopted the mindset for the next couple months that I'm gonna act like I'm not from here and I'm going to go meet with all the small business owners. I'm going to connect with teachers. I'm going to learn what parents think about the very school districts. I'm going to try to become an expert on the local restaurant scene, know all the neighborhoods. I'm going to treat the next, let's say, 90 days as if I just moved to this community and I need to become an expert. If your business isn't where you want it to be, that might be what's missing is that you haven't really taken that part seriously. 

Jamie Tulak: Yeah, or you take it for granted because you’re like how I was in my old market. I knew everyone. I grew up in that community. My dad was like a pillar in the community and knew everyone and I took it for granted to some extent, but then I finally took ownership of that and that's when my brand really blew up in my old market. I was like, well, I know what to do. 

Jamie Tulak: I think that sometimes we take it for granted and we don't spend the time learning about other people. We don't spend the time learning about their businesses. We don't spend the time figuring out how we can help support them and cross-collaborate. There's a lot of growth that can happen there when you actually have that mindset of, let me help this small business owner. How can I help them? And what happens is when you pour a lot into other people, you naturally just get– We don't give to get, but when you give and you truly are genuine about it, you're always going to get. It's just the way it works. 

Max Rymer: Yeah, Jamie. We're doing the weave a little bit right now here, but just parking on 2019 going into 2020, you get asked a lot about how to build a successful real estate business. You had mentioned when you first had that conversation with your husband, it was through tears. Obviously, you had kids that could be a little bit more mobile being a little bit younger. When you said this isn't what God has for me, did that come as a surprise to your husband? What did those conversations look like? Was he on the same page, feeling the same vibe? What was that dynamic as you were making it such a, what seemed like, probably a crazy decision?

Jamie Tulak: At the time, I think we were on the same page. Honestly, I'm just gonna be honest, I'm so grateful for my husband. We've always been on the same page with everything in our lives, in our marriage, decisions with our children, so at that point, I think we were both feeling that way. I don't want to say spiritual depression, but that's kind of what it felt. Again, I don't want to turn this political, so please, people, don't hear me wrong but I just knew that I did not want to raise my kids there. There was just so much that just felt heavy. That's when we were like, man, there's gotta be something better. There's just no freaking way. This does not feel like this is from God right now. 

Jamie Tulak: Once we had those conversations, we were on the same page 100%. There was no surprise there at all, whatsoever. It was more of like, well, what if? What if we actually went after our dreams? What if we actually built life by design? What if we actually relocated and moved and lived the life that we've always said that we wanted to? What if? What's the worst that can happen? It doesn't work out? Okay, then we can move back. It's not the end of the world. We're not trees. We're not stuck. We can move. That's kind of what those conversations looked like. It was like, God, if this is what you have for us, your will be done and we'll figure it out. That's it. But looking back now, people thought we were crazy. They were like, why would you do this? You have everything. Why would you do this? 

Jamie Tulak: Well, hold on one second. I want this to just be so important because this is how I live my life, is that if you are feeling that way right now and you're feeling like there's just absolutely no way, you can. You can move and you can rebuild it, truly. I think people sometimes feel stuck. They feel like this is all I can do and they're just unhappy. But what if you actually went after building a business that you're proud of? What does that look like? That year could be 2025 for you. 

Max Rymer: That's why I asked you the question because I think a lot of our listeners right now, complacency breeds, I would say, that spiritual heaviness and this goes beyond real estate. You're waxing philosophical and spiritual right now so I am too. Me and my wife right now are in a season where we're experiencing among our friend group, among family, we've actually had a few suicides this year.

Jamie Tulak: Heavy.

Max Rymer: It's heavy and it is this realization that you feel stuck. you feel like a tree, as you mentioned before, and that is never the case. If it's in our listeners, if it's in your own business, if it's in your own family life to just have this acute realization that you did, Jamie, once upon a time, that if you're stuck, there's one person who can pull you out of being unstuck and that's you. You're not beholden to your circumstances. And then you moved back in 2019 then so obviously we're on the cusp of some craziness, as you mentioned before. 

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