How To Build A Small Team That’s Actually Profitable

Steven Remy:
It would almost be insulting, I feel like, if I explained what Platform is to someone as, "Oh yeah, they run our Facebook ads for us," because to me, if I owned Platform, I would be insulted if somebody said, "Oh yeah, they run our Facebook ads for us," because it's so much more than that. It's a group of agents from around the company around the country who are all like minded. Nobody is competing with each other because we all have exclusivity in our market. So everyone shares ideas, you copy each other, you can do so many different things and apply it to your market.

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 everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Platform Marketing podcast, where we talk with ambitious real estate agents, learn the local marketing strategies that they are using to grow their business. On today's show, we have Leslie and Steve Remy. This is a husband and wife powerhouse team in McKinney, Texas, Collin County, Texas, kind of an outer suburbs of the Dallas area and they've really, really impressive business growth in the last couple years. So we're not talking about going from $50,000 a year in GCI to a $100.000 or going from $100,000 to $150,000.

Tim Chermak:
Their business growth has been even more impressive than that, and one of the really cool things that we'll be learning today is how they did all that without also increasing their expenses because so often we see agents talk about building mega teams and getting 10 buyers agents on your team and then you basically are building out like a call center where you have multiple ISAs you're paying full time to follow up with leads and you have an army of transaction coordinators and it becomes this big beast of an organization with really high fixed expenses, so you almost have to be closing hundreds of deals a year just to pay your expenses because your monthly payroll ends up being so expensive.

Tim Chermak:
Leslie and Steve have really hit the sweet spot, where they've added expenses and they've invested in key marketing expenses and team members and things like that, when it made sense, but their expenses never increased in a linear fashion necessarily with their income. So the income has always been growing without a correlating increase in their expenses and that's really how you should be doing it. Obviously, you want to maintain high margins in your business, high profit margins or else what's the point? So welcome to the show, Steve and Leslie, I'm really excited to dive in learning more about your entrepreneurial journey.

Tim Chermak:
First, let me just ask you the question. How did you guys get into real estate because I know that when either of you were little kids, if someone would've asked you, "Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up?" And you probably said, "I want to be a cowboy," or "I want to be an astronaut," or "I want to be the president of the United States of America." Most kids aren't saying, "I'd like to be a licensed real estate agent affiliated with the National Association of Realtors." How did you find yourself being a real estate agent as an adult? Tell me about that.

Leslie Remy:
Well, funny that you should ask. I always wanted to be in retail because I loved the beep of the scanner. Every time something was sold when it passed by when I was a little kid. So I always knew that that was a driving force for me, but kind of a funny story. I knew nothing about real estate, zero, never even knew a realtor growing up. My parents still live in the same home I was born in. Yes, still to this day. So the only time I'd ever moved to my life was when I went to college and lived in an apartment and that just wasn't the same either.

Tim Chermak:
So this is definitely not one of those situations where you come from a real estate family where your parents are realtors and it was just the family business?

Leslie Remy:
Absolutely not. So Steven and I were in college. This is 2002. We were engaged. Steven was getting ready to commission to the Air Force out of A&M, and I was at Baylor. This is right after 9/11 happened. He goes to the Air Force, our first duty station... We graduate, we get married. Our first duty station is in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Leslie Remy:
So I just graduated from the business school at Baylor having no idea where we were going, so I had no plans for a job. We finally get to the desert of New Mexico and all of our friends that we had made out there had just graduated from colleges and were all trying to figure out what we were going to do in this tiny town that you either were a teacher or you worked at the bank or what were you going to do?

Leslie Remy:
I had a friend that got a job selling ads for the local newspaper. She said, "I met this wonderful lady. She owns a real estate brokerage and you should come see her and she's looking for somebody to be her receptionist. You should go meet her," and I'm like, "Okay." So I have no idea what a real estate brokerage is, but "I'll go talk to her because I need a job," and Steven's making $24,000 a year or something and we're living on that, but we think, "Well, that's great-

Tim Chermak:
And he's in the Air Force?

Leslie Remy:
He's in the Air Force, yeah. So her name was Joe Carnes, and I went to meet with Joe and she said, "I just need somebody to sit here and be my receptionist." Back at that time, if you needed anything real estate or a lease or you needed to sell, you went into the office, that was the only option. So I started being her receptionist and she said, "If you will do get your license, I'll pay for it and you can become a real estate agent and I'll start giving you all of my VA foreclosures that I don't want to work and you can work those for me," because she was a broker and she'd been doing it a long time and didn't want to work those anymore. So I'm like, "Okay, I have no idea what that means, but sure, that sounds great." So I did and I got my license. She started giving me off her VA foreclosures. My very first sale was a 1976 single wide mobile home.

Tim Chermak:
So that was probably a huge commission check, right?

Leslie Remy:
It was $543. I only worked four months to get paid on that, so it was great, life was good. I think I was closing about four deals a month with her at that time. So that's how I got started in real estate and the rest is history from there.

Tim Chermak:
So that's how you got started. And this whole time Steven, your husband was in the Air Force. Was he planning on being in real estate long term while he was in the Air Force or what was going on in Steve's mind in terms of his career this whole time?

Steven Remy:
I had no idea what I was going to do. I was in the Air Force doing my job. I was gone more often than not. I ended up staying in for five years, of those five years I was gone for three. So I was just one of those guys if I was in it, I had to be in it all the way. So I was volunteering for deployments, volunteering for trainings, so I was hardly ever home and I was really just focused on that, and I still had no idea about anything real estate related, other than the stories I would hear from Leslie when she came home and at that point it was a pretty hot market in Alamogordo actually, where we lived. A lot of investor clients wanted to buy homes with pools because you could rent the homes out.

Steven Remy:
There's a German Air Force base actually on Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo and the German government would actually pay their soldiers more money if they rented a home with a pool. So all the investors wanted to snap up those homes and she would come home and tell me stories about nearly fist fights. Of course, she was never involved in one, but there was a few names in town, it was a town and you knew that they were... I guess you'd call them the crazy ones. She was just telling me those stories and I'm like, "Well, that's interesting," but I had never thought about real estate.

Steven Remy:
We'd met a few investors and we thought about buying an investment property for ourselves, but at that point in time we were 22. This was in 2002 and it was just like we were living on base for free, neither of us had ever bought a home and it was just a lot. Looking back, I wish I would've done it, but it was just a lot at the time and I really had no interest in the complexities of that stuff, especially knowing that in two years we'd be on to the next state. Whether that was stateside or overseas, we didn't know where we were going.

Tim Chermak:
Sure.

Leslie Remy:
Just going to share fun tidbit story from back in those days, like 2002, 2004. We were just babies, just graduated college, just got married and I was already learning the ropes of real estate and what I thought was really fun and interesting is the Stealth 117s were flying out of Holloman and that was the only place they were flying out of. So the Stealth pilots were there and they started getting into real estate and buying properties for the German Air Force members to lease from them.

Leslie Remy:
So I was giving their repeat business because we would buy over and over and over again with the Stealth pilots. So that was just a really fun gig to get to know those guys. Then when we eventually moved from there and got stationed in Denver, I transferred to my license, but I wanted to still be able to work with my Stealth pilots, so I got my mortgage license and then they were still buying property at Holloman. But anyway, so then I was still able to work with the Stealth pilots for years after that.

Tim Chermak:
So what is the difference about like the Stealth pilots versus a normal pilot, just for the lay people that maybe don't know all the intricate details of Air Force lingo?

Leslie Remy:
They're highly specialized. So once they became the cream of the crop of flying those Stealths, that's where they stayed and that's the only base they were flying out of. So very unusual to be in the military and be stationed at one location for 6, 7, 8 years. So that's why they were investing there is because, one, there was nothing else to do in Alamogordo New Mexico, so why not? But they were there for the long haul.

Tim Chermak:
So maybe this is a question for Steve and I'm just interested in this. What is the physical difference of a Stealth aircraft versus a normal military aircraft?

Steven Remy:
So the Stealth aircrafts had a lot of technology. Those 117s have since been retired, but during that time they were top of the line stuff. They have special coatings, they're shaped in special ways, which keeps them from being caught on enemy radar. They carry payloads of certain bombs that other planes can't carry. There's certain things... They call it fly by wire. So the inputs... some cars are becoming that now, the inputs are not manual, when you move any of the, like you would consider the old joystick or whatever to fly a plane, it's not connected to cables that run down the length of the plane, they're connected to the rudders and flaps and all that, it's just all electronic. They have some special radars on them.

Steven Remy:
There's all kinds of things and in order to fly those types of things, like Leslie said, it's a very intense training, it's very specialized and those guys did it day in, day out. I think when you get to that level, it's almost like there's a little bit of crazy in you and we saw that crazy come out at the late nights at the officers club and such. They were a fun group to party with. This is the same group that when the Iraq War kicked off in 2003, they were the ones like... there was two pilots... there was three of them that dropped the first bombs on Baghdad, but there was two that were the fighter squadron commanders that we hung out with quite a bit and these were the guys that went over there and did that and we were hanging out with them weeks later and they're just... You had to have a certain mentality to be able to do those things and these guys definitely had it. So they were definitely a fun bunch to hang out with. They were very intelligent.

Steven Remy:
Most any pilots that you meet are highly, highly intelligent people and it comes with all things, not just in the planes they fly, just all worldly things they're intelligent with. The real estate investing just happened to be this group's, that's what they got into. One of them got into it and convinced the others to get into it and then they started asking Leslie for help with that and next thing , they're going from houses to apartments, small apartments to large apartments and you have to be super intense to be one of those types of pilots. So I think anything they feel that is worthy of taking on their time they get very deep into it and just go full throttle all the way. So whether that's being a pilot for the military or investing in real estate, it's binary with them. There's no middle ground, they're either on or they're off and they were on piloting and they were on real estate investing too. So it was just neat to see that.

Tim Chermak:
And like so many things in life when you look back at how you became realtors and got onto real estate, it wasn't part of some big master plan that you sketched out when you were 18 and 19 of, "Here's how I'm going to build my career." Just one thing led to another and this opportunity that you maximized led to another opportunity that you maximized and that led to another thing and I'm assuming that moving around a couple times probably influenced your decision of, "Hey, maybe I actually do want to do this for the rest of my life being a realtor," because you probably moved more than the average person. So you had a little bit of experience with just the whole process of moving, right? So Steven, Leslie, let's fast forward to the future, let's fast forward to the present day. You had this military background, you're moving all across the country. I'm assuming that probably influenced maybe your feelings of, "Hey, maybe we can actually make real estate our career. Maybe we can do this for a living," right?

Tim Chermak:
It wasn't part of any master plan, but being a military family and having that experience of moving around and seeing so many other people constantly moving around, frankly, you just had more experience in moving and seeing what that looked like. So it kind of makes sense maybe in hindsight that you were destined for a career as realtors. So let's fast forward to the present day. Where's your business at now? The first question I want to ask you, because I love talking about numbers is, what was the GCI last year?

Steven Remy:
So last year the brokerage had GCI right around the $700,000 mark.

Tim Chermak:
That's awesome. And that's split amongst how many team members including you guys?

Steven Remy:
Including us, for last year, there would've been five agents. So the two of us and then three additional agents. We've grown since this time, but yeah, this year will be a little bit different and I can let Leslie get into those numbers.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah because you are in the process of expanding right now and growing. Those are really impressive numbers too. I want to bring attention to that because so often we hear people talk about, "Oh, I've built a team of I brought on two buyers agents or five buyers agents or 14 buyers agents or whatever it is," and then you start talking about the actual numbers of what the GCI is and you're like, "Oh, well you have a lot of agents, but there's not a lot of transactions going on." Or you hear this number that sounds really impressive. Like, "Oh we had $700,000 in GCI," which sounds terrific, and then you find out that was split amongst 20 people, so it's really not as much money as it sounded like when you just quoted this big, impressive, gross revenue number.

Tim Chermak:
But you guys have put up very impressive profitable numbers without having a huge team, without having a ton of expenses. What does the process look like from when you guys just started out as individual agents because at first it was just Leslie, right? Steve wasn't a licensed agent, it was just Leslie. Tell me about the first year that you were in real estate, Leslie. How many houses did you sell? What was the GCI then and how did you scale? How did you grow?

Leslie Remy:
So let's start with our first year with the brokerage here in Texas. It started just me. We're in 2012, we had finally moved back to Texas and we were out of the military, so we weren't moving around anymore, so we knew we were here to stay.

Leslie Remy:
Got my license in 2012 and we opened Astra Realty, our brokerage and at that time I'd already had about 10 years of experience in real estate, so I was planning on it just being me. Both Steven and I both come from entrepreneurial backgrounds in our families, so we knew we wanted to have our own business, but we weren't planning on growing it really from there. So Steven's father-

Tim Chermak:
So basically, you just got license as a broker because you didn't want to pay all the fees and commission splits to some other broker, so you just decided to cut out the middleman. Was that kind of the mentality?

Leslie Remy:
Yeah. The funny part is Steven's dad had gotten his license years before, but he was retired and just did it if family member needed him to help that kind of thing. So he had had his license in Texas for three years at the time and they didn't require you to have a bunch of sales and things like what's required today. So I talked him into going and sitting for the brokers exam, even though he had only sold like two houses and one was his own at the time.

Leslie Remy:
So I got him to take the broker's exam, so he became licensed as a broker. I got my real estate license because you had to have three years of a license before you could sit for the broker exam. So that's how I was able to start Astra, solely because he was my broker, so it was just me. So I'm brand new to the area, not new to real estate, but new to our McKinney market and I started just hitting the ground running and was getting to the point where I was selling 20, 24 houses a year just from my sphere. Of course, that all started with a couple the first year, four or five the next year and just repeatedly doubled every single year for many, many years and then Steven-

Tim Chermak:
And that was basically just by getting like more referrals and your sphere was growing.

Leslie Remy:
Yes.

Tim Chermak:
Is that just like the yes organic process of as you meet more people, they refer more people to you. You weren't necessarily back then investing a ton of money into lead generation or marketing campaigns or anything like that?

Leslie Remy:
None. None at all. That was just organic growth of, I sold two houses this year, they each referred me two people, so next year I sold what six houses and then growing that way. So I was closing probably 20, 24 houses a year, which was the most I could really handle with two toddlers and our own home and Steven had a full-time job in law enforcement and he had gotten licensed so he could help me open doors when I needed to. He was always kind of the driving force behind the business side of our brokerage, got licensed somewhere along the way.

Leslie Remy:
So I'm going and doing as much as I can possibly do and working like a crazy person and then Steven comes to me one day and is like, "Hey, I just talked to this guy that I found on the internet and he has this book called High Hanging Fruit and he knows all about Facebook advertising and I think we should talk to him. He owns a company called Platform and I'm like, "Okay," and I'm real conservative on spending money. I say, I'm the money hoarder, Steven's the spender in a good way, like in a business type way.

Leslie Remy:
So he said, I can't remember, it was like several thousand dollars, and he said, "I'm going to go spend a day with him in Florida, this guy's condo and I'm going to learn how to do Facebook advertising." And I'm like, "Oh Lordy," and in my mind I'm calculating how many houses do I need to sell to make up for this. I'm like, "Okay, I got to sell one house. If this goes bad, we don't ever make it back. This is how we're going to do it." That's how I always calculate like, "How much commission do I need to make for it to be a good investment?" Anyway, so, Tim, Steven goes and meets you in Naples-

Tim Chermak:
Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert.

Leslie Remy:
Yeah, spoiler alert-

Tim Chermak:
This person is me.

Leslie Remy:
Yeah. And he is like, "It's Tim Chermak Platform." I'm like, "Okay, whatever. Hope we see you again when you come back." So he went and of course, you guys had a great day, he learned so much. Then he came back and started trying to do it all himself and of course he was really wanting our market, but somebody already had it, and with the market exclusivity, we weren't able to get it.

Leslie Remy:
So we kept waiting and waiting and then one day you had called Steven and said, "Your market is open. Do you want it?" Steven comes to me, I remember the day. I'm standing in the bedroom and he's like, "Our market is open for Platform. We're going to take it," and I'm like, "And how much is that a month?" I'm like, "We're always really nervous to spend anything." If it had been $100, I'd have been nervous about it. So he is like, "I don't care, we're doing it because," he's like, "if anybody else gets our market, I'm just going to be so upset, so we are doing this."

Steven Remy:
And just for the record, I cannot get away with that in anything else in life, like in our life together, I don't just like, "Hey, here's what we're doing," because then I'll be sleeping at the bottom of our pool like she likes to tell me sometimes, but in business she trusts me so that I can say stuff like that. I haven't let her down yet.

Leslie Remy:
Yeah.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, and some context around that for those who aren't familiar with the Platform is we are a marketing program for realtors, but what makes us different from all the other companies that are marketing systems for agents, whether it's BoomTown, Curator, Commissions Inc, Zillow, Realtor.com, Ylopo, et cetera, is we only work with one realtor per city. So it's not just per zip code or anything, but it's per city area.

Tim Chermak:
So they had come in contact with us as Leslie was saying and apparently it sounds like maybe you were impressed with some of the marketing tips that we taught you, but your area that you lived in, we already had a client that we were working with, so you weren't able to sign up. You wanted to, and we said, "No, we're sorry, actually, your territory is already taken," because we are very, very strict on that. We're very exclusive. We don't make exceptions. If we already have a client in your area, we protect them. As long as they're with us, we're not going to take other clients.

Tim Chermak:
So as you're saying, all of a sudden one day that market opened up and this conversation ensued. It sounds like it wasn't really a conversation as more as Steve telling you, "We are going to do this."

Leslie Remy:
Yeah, he knows that I trust him and like I say, in my mind, I just have to figure out how many houses I need to sell to make me feel better, but I always trust him, and if it wasn't for him pushing the expenses to grow our business. I would never have grown a business, that's always been him moving that along.

Tim Chermak:
So this was really one of the first times, if I'm understanding it correctly, that you had really ever spent money on marketing or advertising because you had essentially organically, which is by the way, really impressive, you had organically grown your business to selling 20, 25 homes a year. So you were going from basically spending zero on marketing to Platform, which I think at the time was like $1,600 a month. So it wasn't like, Steve's like, "Hey, I want to spend a couple hundred dollars on this." This was like a major investment to you at the time.

Leslie Remy:
Absolutely. We had never spent any. I did a Zillow for a couple of months, well maybe six months, let's say, and I exactly broke even on what I spent versus the commissions that we made. So after that I'm like, "Why am I breaking even, that's silly." So that's the only investment we had ever made and I did that for six months and that was it.

Tim Chermak:
And Steve at the time was, he was not a realtor, right, he was full-time law enforcement?

Leslie Remy:
He was full time law enforcement, but he did have a real estate license at the time.

Tim Chermak:
Okay.

Leslie Remy:
And he can speak more to this, but talking about he had learned so much from you, from spending a day or two or whatever you did, but you had given him so much information, so much knowledge, taught him so much about Facebook and how to do the advertising yourself, but still just watching him do it from... it was his 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM job literally and we had toddlers and he had a full-time job and we had a business that we were running and it was so hard for him to keep up with the changes with Facebook and I'm assuming it can be done, but it's tough to do it on your own.

Tim Chermak:
So that first year, and I'm actually not sure if this is a question for Steve or a question for Leslie, but tell me about what happened in your business that first year that you decided to make that investment, for better or worse. Was it hard the first couple months? Was it immediately obvious this was a great decision? Did it take you six months to think, "Is this actually worth it?" What happened that first year that you decided to actually make a pretty serious financial investment into marketing your business with Platform?

Steven Remy:
Yeah. It was a huge investment and I knew every step along the way, Leslie was super uncomfortable with it because she's just a super frugal person in life, right? Like, "Do we really need that?" She's just naturally that way and then when we go from literally spending $0 in advertising, like maybe we spent $250 to put her picture in the school newsletter or something, that's really not even it. So I told her, I said, "We need to ride this out for a year. This is so strategic of a thing that I need you to promise me a year," and she's like, "I'll give it six months," and I'm like, "Okay, let's do nine months." So we had some late night arm wrestling with negotiations on this stuff.

Steven Remy:
I finally got her to agree to nine months and it took a while to get started. There's a lot to learn on our end from like filming the videos and how to interact with the people that were getting leads from. So there was a lot of learning with that that she had to do by herself because I was still employed full time in law enforcement, had long hours, sometimes call outs like things like that would happen. So that's why I could only do it super late at night and early into the morning hours. So I did get her to give me nine months. At probably about that nine month point, I think with the expense of Platform plus our ad spend is when we broke even, is that about right Les?

Leslie Remy:
I'm not sure about that, but I do know-

Tim Chermak:
It certainly wasn't profitable, we can say, within the first 90 days?

Leslie Remy:
Absolutely.

Steven Remy:
No.

Leslie Remy:
And there was one point I went to him and we were doing our videos and that was great. It was awesome for my sphere that I was already working and this is back in 2016. So I was starting to get recognized and staying top of mind through videos and retargeting and all of that program was working so awesome with my personal business sphere that I was working, but we were also getting all these leads in from the Platform system, which was amazing as well. But I, just by myself was... I just went to Steven and was like, "We got to do something. We have all these leads that are coming in and I'm sucking it up. I'm not talking to any of them. I just don't have time. We either need to turn this off, stop spending the money or figure out something."

Leslie Remy:
But like I said it was so good for my organic growth that we hated to turn it off. So what ultimately happened was I said, "Well, why don't we get somebody to work these leads and then we don't have to stop Platform because it's doing so well for my sphere." So I had an assistant transaction coordinator at the time and I just looked to her and I said, "You know what? You, you understand what we're doing here. You're helping us. I think you would be awesome at this." She had never considered real estate. She had a little bit of a real estate background, but hadn't done it in a long time, never been an agent. And I just said, "I think you've got what it takes. Will you get your license and start working these leads for me so that we don't lose all of them?" so we can have the best of both worlds here.

Leslie Remy:
So that's what ended up happening. She got licensed, she started working all of our Platform leads. I continued to work the sphere. We continued to do all the videos and the marketing and the retargeting, and that's how our business started growing. Then after she was busy working the leads, then another agent came on, same thing and then another agent came on. So we had three pretty soon and then about a year later we added another one and now we just added two other agents this week because my four original agents, three of them were working mostly leads to get started. They got to the point where they are about two to three years in, where I was at, where it was great for the sphere, but they've got now repeat clients, referrals, so they're not working the follow up and the leads as-

Tim Chermak:
They're starting to build their own book of business, essentially.

Leslie Remy:
Yep, absolutely. So now we're bringing on new agents to start that whole process over again.

Tim Chermak:
And so you didn't really have this master plan of like, "We're going to build a brokerage and a big team," It kind of just happened because it sounds like after about nine months or so of the Platform Marketing Program, you were so overwhelmed with the amount of referrals you're getting from your sphere and keeping up with the organic growth of your business while also, basically just not having enough time to follow up with all the leads that were coming in, that you just kind of like, "Well, I guess the next step is we need to add someone to the team."

Tim Chermak:
So before we talk about that because I think that's a really interesting evolution in your business, would you guys just mind sharing in your own words, what is the Platform Marketing Program? Because there's probably a lot of realtors listening to this right now that have maybe heard of it, but they're not really familiar. What exactly is it? So how would you describe it in your own words? When you said you signed up for Platform or you made the financial investment to join Platform, what does that exactly mean for your business?

Steven Remy:
Yeah. So our understanding of it has actually changed over time only because I think... Well, I'm not sure, I guess we didn't know fully going in because once I decide on something, I've done all the research, I'm ready to go. So at first to us, it was somebody to run Facebook ads for us. Somebody was going to run Facebook ads for us and we were going to get leads and we were going to call those leads and we were going to get business. Since then and I think we have a much more thorough understanding of it now obviously, is it is an all encompassing like truly marketing. At this point I feel like we're not in the real estate business, I feel like we're in the marketing business and we just happen to be marketing real estate.

Steven Remy:
The running, the actual ads has almost become just, not the main thing anymore, which it used to be to us. Now it's the ideas for the ads, it's filming video. It's really what you guys have been for us is you've helped us tell our story and you've thought of different ways to help us share the story and whether that's helping buyers, helping sellers, recruiting agents out of need, it's such an all encompassing thing, just to minimize it would almost be insulting, I feel like, if I explained to someone as like, "Oh yeah, they run our Facebook ads for us," because that to me, if I owned Platform, I would be insulted if somebody said, "Oh yeah, they run our Facebook ads for us," because it's so much more than that.

Steven Remy:
It's a group of agents from around the country who are all like minded. Nobody is competing with each other because we all have exclusivity in our market, so everyone shares ideas, you copy each other. You can do so many different things and apply it to your market or you see they did something and you change it up a little bit to make it better apply to you.

Steven Remy:
So I think going into it thinking, "Oh, they just run Facebook ads for us," then all of a sudden it's this huge marketing thing and then we have to... It was never our plan to grow. It was Leslie was going to work that, I was going to be in law enforcement and we were super comfortable with that. Like we had everything we ever needed, we had more than everything we ever wanted, we were doing very well and super happy. It really grew out of necessity. We had to have somebody on to help work these and it's just continued to do that.

Steven Remy:
And that's always been, I think Leslie's deep down goal, is to help new agents or agents that are struggling or agents that want to take their game to the next level to help them along because that's how she was brought up. She gives a lot of credit and love to Joe for bringing her up and taking her under her wing because without that she would definitely not be where she's at today and neither would we as a family or our income, our lifestyle, things like that.

Steven Remy:
So just as the agents continue to... they start off, they get going so heavily that they were like her, where they need some help, then we just bring on another agent, they continue to work their sphere, be happy. They're really as successful as they want to be and then we bring on more agents to do that. And it's always her goal to have them meet their transaction volumes and everyone either met or nearly met, I mean by like thousands of dollars, maybe not have met their goals, which they were huge goals when they established them. So just to even get that close or to exceed them was a massive thing.

Steven Remy:
So I know I went way off on the rails on that, Tim, but it's difficult to explain what Platform is because it does so much and there's so much value in everything all together.

Tim Chermak:
It really started, it sounds like, of you thought you were signing up for a Facebook leads program.

Steven Remy:
Yep. That's exactly what it was.

Tim Chermak:
And it turned into being a lot bigger than that. When I describe to people what is Platform, I just say, "Well, it's like hiring your own marketing department." Rather than going out and feeling like "I'm going to hire a full-time marketing employee," someone who has years of industry experience that's going to be a full-time salaried person, which, news flash, is probably not going to be a $15 an hour job, that's going to be a pretty expensive hire, someone who actually knows what they're doing with a marketing, we say, "Well, you can hire a full-time employee to do all this for you and help you grow or you can just hire Platform."

Tim Chermak:
So it's like having a marketing department versus just Facebook leads. So I just wanted to clarify that for anyone listening, if we keep mentioning Platform and you have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, that's what the Platform marketing program is.

Leslie Remy:
Yep. Oh, sorry, Tim. I was just going to say, we went from thinking we were just going to get a few extra leads here and there and get some help with our Facebook lead program to now having seven families within our brokerage that have all, their lives have significantly changed because of the income production that they're able to do for their families. Our goal this year at our company is to help 100 families purchase or sell homes this year. So we went from just one individual to being able to help so many more people, which is life changing for all of us and we're so appreciative of that.

Tim Chermak:
Well, when we started, as you said, you kind of viewed it as Facebook leads, like, "Oh, I'm joining this Platform program because they'll help me get more leads on Facebook," but the actuality is when you join, you realize we'll edit all of your videos, like as many videos as you can film in a month, we'll edit and launch all your videos. We'll tell you what retargeting ads to run. We'll set up all of your Facebook ad funnels to get buyer leads or to get seller leads to help you promote your listings. It's like having a full blown marketing department.

Tim Chermak:
So my question for you, and again, I'm not sure if this is a question even for Steve or for Leslie, is what prompted you maybe at a deeper psychological level or a deeper emotional level when you were at that point where you were already selling, it sounds like, 20, 25 homes a year, pretty much organically, like you weren't having to spend any money on marketing because you just built up your sphere and referrals to the point that you were selling 20, 25 homes a year, which probably means you're making a six-figure income doing that.

Tim Chermak:
What made you feel that, "You know what? I want to finally invest some money in marketing and take this to the next level because essentially I don't think I'll be fulfilled if I keep making this amount of money or keep selling this amount of homes for the rest of my life?" Because the truth is a lot of agents would love to be in that position. They pray for the outcome of, "Oh, I'd love to sell 25 homes a year," because they're only selling seven or they're selling 11 homes a year. And yet, you got to that point and you decided, "Now is when I want to invest and take my business to another level because I want to sell 30 or 40 or 50 homes a year, not 20." What made you get to that point, like I said, maybe psychologically or emotionally where even though you were already successful from the outside looking in, that you decided, "You know what? Let's make this financial investment because we think we can do even better?"

Leslie Remy:
I would say being okay with where we're at is never something that enters our mind. We're always looking to the next best thing. How can we be more successful? How can we do more? That's just ingrained in us. So we never feel like we've reached the point where we're like, "Okay, this is the top. This is good."

Leslie Remy:
So I think part of that is also securing your future of, yes, organically we're to this point, which is great, but who knows if that's going to happen again next year and the next year. So it really solidifies our foundation is what prompted us to continue to move forward as well.

Tim Chermak:
What have been some of the most successful ads that you've run? Let's get really into some of the tangible specifics here. When we talk about the marketing campaigns you have run, whether it's videos you've done or lead generation ads, what has seemed to really make the biggest difference for you, whether it's in terms of generating leads or videos that have gotten tens of thousands of views? Looking back over the last couple years that you've been running this Platform marketing program, what are just a couple of the high points of, "Wow, this particular ad or that particular ad seemed to work really, really well?"

Steven Remy:
There's two results of ads, there's two different types of ads. There's actually a lot, but we quantify them into two. One is for actual, tangible lead generation, like somebody pops up in your system as like, "Okay, they want to buy a house. let's give them a call," or they've called us. The other one is more what people would traditionally consider marketing. Like you're just getting your name out there and people see who you are, you're telling stories about yourself. So I think generally the most successful ones have been those type of, I think we call it like a fuzzy ROI, where people get to know you. It's not all about, "Hey house for sale, come see it," and then you blast that out to 10,000 people in your area and they see it and if they're not interested in it, then they don't give it a second look, if they are interested in it, it's just not right for them because it doesn't have a pool or whatever.

Steven Remy:
Where you can really get people involved in looking at you is by telling personal stories. So whether that's something that happened to you or something that happened to your child, it could be a positive, it could be a negative, it could be a challenge, it could be a win. Just telling those stories because people like to hear stories, that's why they watch movies, that's why they read books, that's why they watch television. They watch a story play out in front of them and you can do that through video, you can do that through text.

Steven Remy:
I've always been a big writer. I like to write things out and it's just a natural strength of mine. I don't have many, but that is one of them, I have to say that, but telling those stories and when people read those stories, they see those things in themselves or they've been in those similar situations and when they see that they start to identify with you and you get a little bit vulnerable in your stories.

Steven Remy:
And people say, "Oh man, that's a real human being. That's not just some polished, perfect person that's always smiling and talking about how successful they are, how they sold another house or there's another listing. They're a mom, they're a dad, they're a parent who has challenges, they're a parent who has wins." all those types of things draw people in and they start to understand like, "Man, that person is just like me. I'd get along with them because their son plays baseball too, or their daughter is doing great and cheerleading," or whatever the story is or they had a hard week this week because the kids are worn out or their dog passed away.

Tim Chermak:
The kid spent a lot of money on Fortnite.

Steven Remy:
Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah. Mama got protective of him when that happened. But yeah, just stuff that people can identify with and all you're doing is you're telling a story about yourself. You have to get comfortable doing that and people are like, "Oh wow, they're human, they're just like me," and then when the-

Tim Chermak:
Yep, I actually, as you're saying all this, Steve, I remember a retargeting ad that we ran that was a video that you had just filmed, like screaming from the sideline as the happy father when your son caught a deep bomb of a touchdown pass in flag football.

Steven Remy:
Yep.

Tim Chermak:
And you happened to be filming that play and it was this big lofting pass and he just caught it in stride and ran for... I'm not sure how big the field is in flag football, but if it was the NFL equivalent, it would've been like an 80 yard touchdown bomb.

Steven Remy:
Yeah.

Tim Chermak:
And he just runs the whole way and then you typed up this really cool post about how you've trained him, "Once you have the ball and you're running, never look back at the defenders, only look forward," and he's running the whole time. You can just tell once he caught it that primal instinct kicked in and he just turned on the afterburners and he's just sprinting, you score a touchdown on the play. We ran that as a retargeting ad.

Tim Chermak:
That's an example of what you're talking about, kind of this fuzzy ROI, because marketing can be boiled down to just two steps. First step is get someone to click on some sort of lead generation ad that actually is related to buying or selling a house, some free report of homes or information about a listing or information about an open house you have coming up, whatever. Some sort of ad that by clicking on it, it proves that person is interested in the somewhat near future, maybe in the next year or whatever, about buying or selling a house because now they're on your retargeting list.

Tim Chermak:
Step two is just show interesting things to them with retargeting ads that have sometimes absolutely nothing to do with buying or selling a house. This ad is an example of that step two of retargeting, where once we know that they've clicked on some sort of new listing ad or open house or a free report of all the homes in the area that have a fenced in backyard or whatever the ad is that we happen to be promoting, now they're on that retargeting database and we can run what's called a retargeting ad to them and the only purpose is to keep you guys top of mind. The only purpose is we just want to prove that with all this content that again, seemingly has nothing to do with real estate, we're just proving that you guys are cool people, and you're just like them.

Tim Chermak:
It's like, "Hey, we have kids, they play sports. We go on family vacations, we have family fights, we have family movie nights, we," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're just sharing some of the stuff that you honestly normally would post on your personal social media pages and you put the social back into social media with your advertisements.

Tim Chermak:
So I think a lot of your most successful ads that you've run, to get at this idea of fuzzy ROI that you're talking about, a lot of your most successful ads don't really look anything like ads. Like that would pop up in someone's newsfeed and it's like, "Oh, this is a home video of a dad screaming, cheering for his son who just scored a touchdown in flag football." This doesn't look like an ad. It has nothing to do with real estate. There's no call to action at the end of like, "PS, if you want to buy a host click here for our website." It's the type of thing you would personally post on your social media, but the cumulative effect over time of constantly putting out content like that, of sharing, that shows family moments, those family memories, it humanizes you and people feel like they're getting to know you over time.

Steven Remy:
Yeah, absolutely. And there was no master plan with that video that was just me being a dad recording it and then I recorded it and I'm like, "Man, he's actually listening to the things I'm telling him. I'm so proud of him," and that was originally just a post on my personal feed. Then you're like, "Dude, that's an awesome post. You should totally run that as an ad," and I'm like, "Oh, I really should. I guess that would be really good," and it was just capturing a moment in everyday life.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. And those ads work really well precisely because they don't look like ads and I think you've, you've been able to provide that marketing strategy to your agents too, that have joined your team because it often starts out like, "Hey, join my team. The value proposition is that I'll feed you leads," because part of Platform obviously is you are generating leads around the clock, you're getting hundreds of new leads every month. But eventually what happens is someone gets that critical mass in their business, they hit escape velocity where they don't necessarily need leads every day or every week or every month, and at that point you start running some more of those personal ads for them too. Like the retargeting ads that help build their book of business and help people feel like they're getting to know them. Like you're helping them edit their videos too.

Steven Remy:
Yeah, absolutely and we've got agents that are like two years in that are like, "Can you turn the ads off for me because I'm so busy with other stuff?" I just can't handle new things coming in," and these are agents that are two years in and like they're at about $100,000 GCI.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. I was actually going to say you had told me in a previous conversation that you have multiple agents on your team that are making over $100,000 a year. That's really noteworthy because a lot of people, when they build a team... I mean, no one ever says this out loud, this is never how they word it, but often the motivation for a successful agent building a team is like, "Well, I just want to bring on a team member who can basically take all the scraps from the table, all the leads I don't really want to work with. I'll just give them to them, and if they make $30,000 a year or $40,000 a year, I don't really care because I just need someone to take the leads that I don't want to work with." And it's like, "That's just kind of what I want." You don't really care about their career development or their building, their book of business. You just want them as almost like a release valve, so you don't have to work as much.

Tim Chermak:
You guys do not have that mentality at all. You have multiple agents on your team that are making over $100,000 a year, that's really impressive.

Leslie Remy:
Yeah. Just a note on that, they don't have any expenses. We pay almost every one of their expenses. So they don't pay any marketing at all. So that is what we try to provide to our agents, that they can skip all of the obstacles that we went through when we were getting started and then just go in straight to, by year two or three, my goal is for all of our agents to be making $100,000 with as little expenses as possible and as highest quality of life that they can have.

Tim Chermak:
What do you think is the biggest mistake that agents make when they're early on, maybe in their first year or two that as someone who loves to mentor agents, because I know that that's why you're building a team, that's part of it, is that you actually intrinsically enjoy mentoring and coaching agents. What is a big mistake that you see them making of maybe why they don't grow their business faster? Because a lot of agents take like 5, 10 years to ramp up to even making $100,000 a year and you obviously did all that a lot quicker. You've learned a lot of things along the way. If you could narrow it down to one thing, what is the biggest mistake you see early agents making, like beginning agents?

Leslie Remy:
It's that roller coaster of marketing, sales, follow up, lead generation and you're building, building, and then you have a bunch of contracts and you're working a bunch of clients and then you're at the top and then you're not doing any kind of marketing strategy. So then that goes back down and then you have to build back up again. So that is what we're trying to do is to have the continuous marketing strategy happening all the time in the background that the agents are not having to worry about. Like we say, "Show up here, we're going to film this video." They show up in an hour and do what they need to do and then we continue the rest of the process in the background, so they can just be out showing houses, selling, writing contracts continuously.

Leslie Remy:
So taking that part off of the agent, the marketing structure, is what allows them to level out and not go up and down and up and down, which is what you see constantly with a traditional agent is why it takes so long to level out those peaks and valleys.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, you had mentioned that last year, we're not sure on the specific amount, but I know that you guys filmed and produced and launched out over 60 videos last year alone and obviously that's an average of over five videos a month. Part of that reason is because you don't have to edit your videos, you don't have to publish your videos or handle any of that uploading or processing because the marketing team is doing that for you. What has been maybe a driving force of how your marketing has evolved in the last two or three years? Because I know like what you spend your time doing now in 2020 and 2021 is not really the marketing necessarily that were doing in 2017, 2018. So how has your marketing even changed in the last couple years?

Steven Remy:
That's a good question. I almost feel like we're getting more into, like I mentioned earlier, the storytelling of what's going on. For us specifically in the brokerage, now sometimes we're getting into storytelling about the brokerage itself, about the success of some of the agents that they've had. A lot of it is really just that, the storytelling, the less looking like ads, the less amount of times we would ever say, "If you're looking to buy or sell a home, call us," we're just trying to stay out of that. Some of that is necessary, you got to give people a call to action, they have to know what to do, but really I feel like we're at the point now we feel like we're doing a lot of more branding type stuff as we grow. Sure,

Tim Chermak:
Sure. Kind of that fuzzy ROI, long term branding where there's not as much lead generation or direct calls to action, but you know that it's going to result in more referrals.

Steven Remy:
Yeah, exactly. We tell our story and people are more naturally drawn to who we are the more they see that and you get less and less clients or agents that are interested that might not be quite the match, like a personality match, if that makes sense. We'll help anybody and we love helping everyone, but just the more people get to know you, the people that feel like they're like you or they've had similar experiences in life, they're just naturally attracted to you and what you've got going on.

Steven Remy:
I see our agents becoming more and more friends with clients, like literally, "Hey, they were my client two years ago and we're going to hang out with our kids again, because we're like best friends now." We see a lot more of that with just almost like the match making that's going on.

Tim Chermak:
So the marketing has evolved almost to the point where it's no longer just about generating a lead, but the marketing is facilitating you actually getting to know people.

Steven Remy:
Right. Yes, a hundred percent.

Leslie Remy:
Continuing to build that trust.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. It's funny because everyone talks about that, "Oh, marketing is all about trust. It's all about getting to know your customers and bonding," but like you guys have actually done that. You actually are building a sphere for yourself and a brand for your business and I think the real proof of your expertise, the real proof that you've mastered this, is that you not only did it for yourself, you did it for the agents that have joined your team. Like you're helping them build their own brands and their own book of business.

Tim Chermak:
So, it proves that you didn't just get lucky. You were actually able to repeat that process for other people with just as good of results, which is really impressive. I want to ask you a couple specific questions here about the marketing, just in case people are wondering what it is like that you do on a day to day basis, a specific look at the marketing itself. So on a given month, it doesn't have to be the exact dollar amount, but on a given month, what are you guys approximately spending on online ads, on Facebook ads?

Steven Remy:
Actual ad spend probably anywhere from $900 to $1,200, maybe as high as $1,400 some months just depending on what we've got going on, how busy the market is, things like that.

Tim Chermak:
Okay. So you're probably maybe spending 12,000 to $15,000 a year on actual Facebook ads?

Steven Remy:
Yep, that would be accurate.

Tim Chermak:
Something like that. How many total transactions did the overall team do last year, like the brokerage?

Steven Remy:
83 transactions.

Tim Chermak:
Awesome. So you did over 80 transactions fueled by, let's just call it $15,000 of advertising spend and that created over $700,000 in total GCI, is that right?

Steven Remy:
Correct.

Tim Chermak:
That's a really fantastic return on investment.

Steven Remy:
Yes.

Tim Chermak:
And you don't have a lot of high fixed expenses. I think that's the important piece that so many agents miss, they maybe attend a training about building a mega team or this or that and they get really ambitious and they hear these impressive gross revenue numbers or how many team members someone has, and they just start adding, adding and adding, whether it's adding team members, paid assistance, transaction coordinators, buyers, agents, full-time, ISAs, this marketing program, that marketing program, and all of a sudden the top line numbers can look good and they can look impressive, but then you look at all your expenses and it's like your net take home didn't really go up all that much because your expenses were just increasing right along with your income.

Tim Chermak:
You guys have figured out that sweet spot in your business where you're running extremely profitable high margin business, where expenses are very low and you and your team are selling over 80 homes a year and I guarantee that you guys will break over 100 homes this year, if not 150 at the pace you guys are going, but your expenses aren't necessarily increasing proportionally with that, which is obviously a good thing.

Steven Remy:
Right. Yeah, our expenses increase when we bring more agents on. I would say most brokerages run possibly even leaner than we run as far as expenses, but we just have a different concept of our agents. Our goal is to do... We do as much as we can, we spend as much as we can on them to make sure that they are freed up to sell houses because that's what they're best at. The less time they spend filling out paperwork the better. Technically those are hourly jobs that you could sub out and when you look at that agent's per hour rate, they're very, very, very expensive paper filler router.

Steven Remy:
So, we'll pay for all sorts of things. We pay for their signs, we pay for their business cards, we pay for all the marketing, all the editing obviously, we pay for-

Leslie Remy:
Equipment.

Steven Remy:
Yeah. All of the equipment, all the video equipment we use, which is really phones and some microphones, things like that, but we have to start adding those up the more agents we bring on. We do quarterly date nights, like with them and their families, their husbands or their wives to keep everyone close together because everyone's friends outside of their work relationship with each other. So we spend a ton of money on that stuff. We could run way leaner, but we just want the agents to be freed up what they're best at doing, and that's selling homes, that's negotiating things and we'll take care of the rest. We're even getting this year, we've just started that we're paying for a transaction coordinator for them, depending on the type of transaction it is, where it comes from. That's an added expense we're taking on because I'd rather pay that expense than have them spend multiple hours filling out paperwork when they could be calling leads or showing houses and doing the things they love to do.

Tim Chermak:
And you're obviously going to make that back in the long term success of your brand and the long term profits, because this isn't something that shows up in the next 90 days or even in the next six months. But one thing that a lot of agents run into if they add some team members over time and they start building that team, building that brokerage is people leave. They'll get a better deal somewhere else and they'll feel like, "Oh, I'm going to make a slightly better commission split or they're offering me a signing bonus if I go somewhere else," whatever and then agents leave.

Tim Chermak:
You're playing the long game, where you're adding so much more value to your agents that stay with you by paying for all of their marketing, providing them leads, editing all of their videos, helping them build a true book of business that, yeah, you have to spend a little money now, but in the long run you make more than that back because of loyalty. You don't really have to worry about your team and your business being a revolving door of constantly hiring and bringing on new agents because you had people leave. Are there going to be some people who leave? Yeah, totally. You'll always have some people who leave, but I think you guys have proven that there is a way to do it that is certainly an improvement over what is maybe the status quo in the industry of building a team that's just a revolving door every year.

Leslie Remy:
Absolutely. We hope that we are showing our agents enough value that they are in it with us for the long haul, because that's how we feel about them. We are so loyal to our agents and they are in reciprocal as well, because they're so important to us and we want to be an integral part of their business as well.

Leslie Remy:
It's been amazing for me to see where I started with Joe bringing me on as a 22 year old, never purchased a home, giving me leads to get me started. So now it's full circle for me that I'm able to do that for agents and then to get those agents to where they're only working their spheres and how to do that and how to maintain that and then getting to start the process over again. We also have a profit sharing program within our brokerage as well. So those agents, once they've been with us for a while and they decide to bring on other agents, then they get to share in those profits as well. So it's just a continued growth pattern. So hoping to have our agents for years and years to come.

Tim Chermak:
And a lot of it is fueled by marketing because, hey, this is a marketing podcast, so I have to bring it full circle, right? A lot of that is fueled by marketing, because I think that's your magic ingredient, is that lots of brokers try to recruit people all the time or people building a team try to recruit and they talk about the value of mentoring and the value of coaching, and the truth is most of them aren't doing that. I know you are. Everyone says they do mentoring and coaching, you guys are actually doing that, and on top of that, you're providing a full stack marketing program that frankly, if any other agents tried to sign up for elsewhere, would cost them over $1,000 a month, not $1,000 a year, but probably over $1,000 a month is what they would be spending to try to replicate the marketing value that you're driving for them.

Steven Remy:
Yeah. And Leslie has done a great job of putting her money where her mouth is on that, in the sense that she doesn't take on new clients anymore. Any transactions she does handle are long term clients that will literally only work with her, but anyone else that comes in, even referrals from other people, she'll play matchmaker like, "Which one of my agents will mesh best with this personality of this person?" and she'll play matchmaker, and those go directly to her agents, and she does that not so she could work less, but she's doing that so she can shift her focus from handling transactions... Her agents are her clients now, not her buyers and sellers.

Tim Chermak:
Really moving out of production and really becoming like the CEO of your business.

Steven Remy:
Right.

Tim Chermak:
That's awesome.

Leslie Remy:
Yeah. We truly are marketing firm that happens to sell houses. Our marketing through Platform is our secret sauce, from recruiting and from a client standard because our agents are so specialized in negotiations and buying and selling houses and the market is so hot right now of how to find a house for our buyers to buy and how to write contracts for them to win. They're not worried about marketing or "Where am I going to get the next client?" or setting up a client appreciation party and all these other things that a typical agent is having to focus on every single day. That is why our agents are so high quality for our clients, it's because they are highly specialized in doing the job that the client's hiring them to do.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. They're actually spending more time doing the job of being a realtor and serving those clients because they don't have to spend a bunch of time building out their marketing campaigns because you're handling all of that for them.

Leslie Remy:
Absolutely, through Platform.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. So, what's exciting looking forward for the next year? You've obviously grown your business to this point, you're extremely successful, there was over $700,000 in team GCI last year, over 80 transactions, a lot of that being fueled by only $15,000 that you spent on ads to create $700,000 in GCI. What's next? What new marketing initiatives or new marketing strategies are you excited to roll out in the next year?

Steven Remy:
So we are really doing a shift from telling the brokerages story or like Leslie and my story into telling each individual agent's story across our platforms. So what I mean by that is we have agents that are asking us to turn off or turn down the number of leads they receive because they're building their own sphere business, and so not to keep them out of what we're doing, in order to not do that, we want to start telling their personal stories of what's going on. So you'll see a lot more either videos or photos accompanied by stories about them where they can start telling their individual stories. I think they're already being recognized just through their listings, but now people are really going to start to meet them and hear their stories in our marketing programs. We've got some really cool agents and they all have some really neat stories. They have interesting family circumstances or they have interesting business situations, all those types of things, you'll start to hear more about them.

Steven Remy:
So we're shifting the focus from us as a brokerage onto our agents and really making our agents their own individual celebrities because they're to that point where they've got a bunch of clients and they can start telling those stories about themselves. And I think as we learn from those, we'll start rolling that out even earlier to our new agents of having them tell their stories. It's taken us time to realize that's necessary, so we're really putting that into high gear to shift our focus to that. So people really do start to track them down instead of them trying to track down people or clients or leads.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. So really your marketing strategy at a high level is becoming less top down, less centralized and it's becoming more decentralized and grassroots where not everything is branding you two or the brokerage as a whole, but you're individually branding the agents to their individual spheres to help them build their own individual brand, to use that word again, helping them develop a book of business that's not about Astra Realty or the brokerage or the team, but it truly makes them feel like more of the entrepreneur that they are.

Steven Remy:
Right. Absolutely and highlighting their individual specialties. Some of them like to sell condos, some like farm and ranch, others like single family residences. Whatever they're into, we want to highlight those things. Some are like super sports moms and they can speak to the other super sports moms that are out there and really that takes a lot... I think a lot of brokerages don't do that because they're more concerned about the brokerage than they are about the individual agent advertising themselves or marketing themselves and that does create some sense of vulnerability. Like, "Well, if we help them build their own business, they're going to go out on their own and do it on their own."

Tim Chermak:
What if they leave, right?

Steven Remy:
Yeah, exactly. One, we always are thinking of what can we do to add value to keep them happy and keep them around because obviously that's good for us and it's good for them, the more stability they have, the better and if somebody chooses to leave and do their own thing, it's one of those things that we can sit back and say, "While we're sad to see you leave, we love the fact that you've built such a business for yourself that you feel that comfortable in doing that."

Steven Remy:
Obviously that's not ideal because they're having to change, we're having to change, but that's something that we're always racking our brains on, is nearly every conversation we have, at least once a day, we're talking about what else can we do for agents? Or we see something and we're like, "Oh, we should totally tell Lacey to do this," or "We should tell Sherry to do that," and "We got to make sure we schedule the videos for Lindsay." Like whatever it is, we're always come up with the ideas, we're always shooting them out ideas and maybe they get annoyed by it, I don't know, but we're just always trying to stay relevant to them because they're not here for us by any means. We are here for them. Like they are our clients.

Tim Chermak:
It's that classic business maxim of what happens if you invest in your team and they become really successful and they leave? It's like well, what happens if you don't invest in them and they never become successful and they stay?

Steven Remy:
Exactly.

Tim Chermak:
Like you'd way rather have that problem of people becoming so successful that they leave than have the inverse of the problem where they stay, but they never became successful. It's like why would you want to have a bunch of below average agents on your team or else what was the point of ever building a team? Either you want to do it with excellence or you just shouldn't have done it at all.

Tim Chermak:
So I really admire the way you're doing it because a lot of brokerage owners, a lot of team owners, I think, don't have the intellectual courage to actually invest in their team members because subconsciously they're just afraid that what if they leave? So you guys are proving that that model works.

Leslie Remy:
Absolutely. I have service clients for my entire career and that mental shift of my agents are my clients is top priority for me. I'm so thankful for my beginning and just happy to see that come around full circle.

Tim Chermak:
All right. Well thank you guys for joining the Platform marketing show here. I think your story is really, really interesting and I think that you're running your business in a unique way where you've been able to grow the GCI and grow the number of transactions every year by always thinking about marketing and being on the leading edge of marketing. I'm really excited to see what you guys do as you continue to grow in this next year.

Tim Chermak:
So Steve, Leslie, thank you for joining us. I want to honor your time because I'm sure you probably need to go out and sell a bunch of houses and help your team sell a bunch of houses. So let's talk soon. All right.

Leslie Remy:
Thanks, Tim, appreciate it.

Steven Remy:
Thanks for having us.