So, What's This "Girls With Grit" Thing All About?

Tara McCarthy: If there's one thing that you're looking to do to improve your business this year, it's having a power hour at the beginning of your day where it is completely uninterrupted time that you have conversations with people that are in your life. It doesn't have to be about real estate. It's not about calling somebody up and saying, “Who do you know that might want to buy yourself a home? I'm never too busy for your referrals.” It's not that. It's, “Oh, my God. I saw that you got a dog. That is so awesome. What did you name him? Where did you get him? What made you decide to get a dog?” It's about having literally a minimum of 10 back and forth conversations every single day, whether it's on the phone, text message, DM. Just the best business plan is to be a good person and just care about people. That will come back to you tenfold. 

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 Chermak. Welcome back to another episode of The Platform Marketing Show. I'm joined today by the Girls With Grit. Tara, Lauren, Jamie, welcome to the show. 

Tara McCarthy: Hey, thanks for having us. 

Lauren Rocco: Thank you. 

Tim Chermak: I wanted to interview all three of you and get the backstory, the origin story of Girls With Grit. It seems like it came out of nowhere in the last couple years, and all of a sudden, one of the most popular kind of Masterminds, coaching groups, communities. I'm not even sure what word you would use to describe Girls With Grit. 

Jamie Tulak: We don't even know. We don’t know, Tim.

Lauren Rocco: We're a movement, Tim. That's what we're calling ourselves. We're a movement and those things. It's definitely the most exciting overnight success story that's four years in the making, maybe 20 years in the making depending on who you talk to. One of us, right?

Tim Chermak: Well, we are celebrating our 10-year anniversary for Platform this year. We've been in the real estate marketing game for 10 years now. I feel like with that perspective, it's like Girls With Grit just came out of nowhere in the last couple years. Even amongst our clients that we have, I saw several people last year saying, “Who's going to the Girls With Grit event? Who's going?” They're all excited. I should know about it and I hadn't heard of it. I'm like, “What is this?” Everyone's super excited about it. And I was talking to you just previously and you guys said, “Oh, yeah. We got rolling in 2021,” you said? 

Lauren Rocco: Yes, ‘21. We were in the thick of COVID and everybody was trying to figure out this new normal and how are we going to operate the market at that point. Some people were still trying to figure out how to get into houses and then other people were like, how do I compete in this multiple offer environment? How do I win? 

Lauren Rocco: And so the three of us had known each other for a while. I mean, we've all been doing real estate between 16 and 20 years. We ran on a lot of the same circles. We were part of the same brokerage. We just came together and we were like, “Look, this is a little bit ridiculous that there's not more leadership inside of our industry for what is happening in the market right now.” You have a lot of people that haven't sold a house in 10 years trying to tell people how to sell a house in this craziness of what's going on. 

Lauren Rocco: I mean, it kind of started– it's almost comical at this point because I don't even know if clubhouse is a thing anymore, but it started on clubhouse. We just started having some weekly chats with wine. Kids are in bed, let's talk about business. Let's see how we can grow and learn from each other. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We moved into a Facebook community in March of that year, and then in the middle of COVID, we were like, “You know what we should do? We should host an in-person event because so many people are hanging out in person right now.” 

Tim Chermak: “We should host a super spreader event. That'll get the word out.”

Tara McCarthy: Yeah. Let’s call every hotel across the country to find out who will host us. Nashville, Tennessee was in, man. They were like, “Yes, we are gonna host Girls With Grit.” We had our first in-person event in June of 2021. I mean, honestly, it was, like, 80 girls. We weren't even sure if anybody would show up, but it was about 80 women. Since then, I mean, really, the community has just grown. We're just about at 20,000 women right now in our Facebook community. We're getting ready to host our fourth in-person event. Our in-person events have like 6X-ed now in terms of attendance and impacts and everything, which is awesome. 

Jamie Tulak: And budget. 

Tara McCarthy: I think it's 10X to the budget actually, somehow. 

Jamie Tulak: But actually, I'm gonna do a quick plug. Tim, we're excited because Platform Marketing is actually our headline sponsor this year at our event. We're stoked about that. So, thank you. 

Tara McCarthy: We appreciate it. 

Tim Chermak: Well, that's why when I was saying how impressed I was with your community and this brand that you've built with Girls With Grit because clearly the people who attended the event, people in your Facebook group, they're genuinely excited about what you guys are doing there. I know as a podcast host I'm supposed to say that to every guest who comes on the show. “Oh, it's so cool what you've built,” and whatever, but I think I put my money where my mouth is that we're sponsoring the event this year because I genuinely do respect what you've built. I would love for the Platform Marketing brand to be affiliated with that because I feel like we vibe and have the same values in terms of how we go about marketing. I'm a huge fan and I respect what you guys have built in just, like I said, the last couple years. I feel like it's scaled really quickly to where two, three years ago, pretty much no one had heard of Girls With Grit. 

Tara McCarthy: Nobody knew who Girls With Grit was. They were like, “Wait, grits? Like the breakfast?”

Tim Chermak: Now it's almost a household name amongst women in real estate. 

Jamie Tulak: Honestly, it's kind of funny, Tim, because we joke we don't even have names anymore. It's like, “Oh, my gosh. There's the Girls With Grit.” It's like, “Well, yeah. I'm Jamie. That's Tara and Lauren.” Everywhere we go, it's like, “Oh, it's the Girls With Grit.” I'm like, “Yeah.”

Tim Chermak: So obviously, you've built this brand. It's really appealing to people. People want to come to your events that you host every year. You have this Facebook group that is approaching 20,000 ladies in this Facebook group. I was looking at it from like a 30,000 foot macro perspective. The more you get to know me, you'll know I'm a complete nerd. I always look for a deeper connection between things of what's going on at that macro level and I thought, you know what? It just makes perfect sense from a demographic perspective of why Girls With Grit is thriving right now. 

Tim Chermak: Because when you look at the average age of the average agent in the real estate industry, the average agent is a boomer. I know that term has become a pejorative in the last couple years where you say it as an insult like, “Okay, boomer,” but the average agent in the United States is, I think, 55 years old, 60 years old, 65 years old, something like that. And even that is skewed because the agents in lots of cities in the US definitely skew younger. There's a lot of millennial agents that are in their 30s now, but lots of areas in the country, the actual median age of a realtor in that market might be 64 years old to where they're collecting social security. 

Tim Chermak: There hasn't been a young movement of younger realtors that are hitting the prime of your career now, where if you just got started when you were 25 years old, 26 years old, let's say, you may have crushed it in your 20s relative to other 20 year olds, but I think often it takes five to 10 years to build enough experience, enough connections to where you really hit cruising altitude in your career in your 30s. Now, I think that next generation is coming onto the real estate scene and you ladies are at the forefront of that like, hey, we are the realtors now. It's almost like the older agents, the older brokers that have been doing it for 30 years, yeah, they're maybe still licensed, they're still selling a couple homes a year, but they're not really defining the profession anymore. It's really people like Jamie, Tara, and Lauren that are defining what you think of when you think of a real estate agent now.

Tara McCarthy: It's so funny actually Tim because when Girls With Grit first started, so this is the thing, like we're vibe, right? We're cool vibe. We like 90s rap. You know what I mean? We just are unapologetically who we are and if you don't like it, then, whatever, maybe we're just not the group for you. But when Girls With Grit first started, it was a lot of women our age because I think that we resonated in that way, but now, we have actually a lot of the demographic that you're talking about right now. I don't even want to call them older women, but it's like the 55 years old, the 60 years old, 65 years old. 

Tim Chermak: If they're older than me, then they're older women.

Tara McCarthy: Yeah, if they're older than you, but this is the thing. They have self coined themselves Grannies With Grit. Literally, they buy t-shirts that say Grannies With Grit. They've just created this whole community inside of our community. The coolest part is they're like, look, some of them have been in the business a long time. For some of them, this is the second or third career for them. But they're like, we recognize that we have to adapt and change and pivot and do all the things. 

Tara McCarthy: I'm 42 years old, or about to be 42 years old, and so I even look back and it's like, what are the 25 year olds doing? What do we need to be able to do in order to stay relevant, be relevant, be in the forefront of what's going on? But I think that that's also part of the reason that we've gained a lot of popularity though, Tim, is that unapologetic attitude. So our tagline for Girls With Grit is building a big ass business unapologetically. Because the three of us, one of the things that we ran into and part of the reason we started Girls With Grit was because as we saw higher levels of success and we started making deep into the six figures and close to seven figures, this weird thing happens and we didn't really understand it because we've all been very professionally driven our whole lives. 

Tara McCarthy: When we started to have kids, this whole opinion of who you are as a person is really skewed. This is always awkward to talk about with a guy, but it's like a guy goes out and they build a business and they have a huge impact and all of this. Everybody's like, “Oh, my gosh. He must be the best dad. I wish my husband was that driven,” all of these things.You walk on water. But a woman goes out and does the same thing and it's like, “What kind of mom is she? Does she even go to any of her kids' games? When does she volunteer?” It's this completely different perspective. 

Tara McCarthy: One of our core values is really showing women you can have it all. When you leverage tools and people inside of your business, like Platform Marketing, you can run a really, really highly successful real estate business and do all the things professionally that you want to do but still be at every football game and have the Sundays be family time and volunteer in the school and not miss a moment. You can have it all, you just have to be methodical about it. 

Tim Chermak: This is where I'll hop in and say that perhaps my favorite episode ever of The Platform Marketing Show that we recorded was actually one of the very first ones where I interviewed Justin Liller. Justin is an agent in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. It's basically a luxury second-home lake community that most of the people who own homes on the lake are coming from DC or Pittsburgh or basically the big cities out in the East. He actually recently sold a lake home on that lake to, I can't reveal the name for a confidentiality reasons, but it's an owner of an NFL team. That can give you an idea of the type of people that are buying out on this lake. That's the type of community where when you're running social media ads as a real estate agent, you would think, “Oh, I bet Facebook ads are not going to work or Instagram ads are not going to work.”

Tim Chermak:  Because of that demographic, it's like, well, no one who lives there actually lives there. They're going for the month in the summer or whatever and yet Justin has built this business. And what we talked about in this podcast episode is that there's this link between marketing and your quality of life, like your standard of living as a husband, as a dad. There's a link between marketing and your quality of life because there's lots of agents, both ladies and dudes, who might make a ton of money, they might be selling 40, 50, 60, 70 homes a year, but they do barely see their families. Or they're missing the birthday parties, they're missing the baseball games, the dancer recitals. 

Tim Chermak: What we talked about in Justin's episode wasn't even really the marketing tactics he was using. I mean, we talked about that a little bit, but most of that conversation was about what I discovered is that since I built this brand, people respect me so much in the community and they want to work with me specifically that they don't view me as a door opener. If I tell them that, “Hey, I'm out this weekend because I like snowmobiling with my kids,” he's super into snowmobiling, “And so if I'm skiing or snowmobiling with my kids, I can't show you this house on Saturday or Sunday, but I can meet you Monday at noon. Is that okay?” that before he did all this marketing, he was never in a position to do that because he would have to take any client, any call at any hour of the week because he needed to go show a house. He didn't want to lose that lead to someone else. 

Tim Chermak: Now, because of marketing, because he's built up that brand and that positioning in the community, he has all the confidence in the world to say, “Hey, sorry. I'm not working this weekend. I'm with my kids, but I'll show it to you on Monday,” and actually people respect him even more because he's willing to say that. It's almost like you're playing hard to get. It's like, “Oh, okay. Well, I want to work with you, so I will gladly wait till Monday to go look at that house.” 

Tim Chermak: People never connect the dots and they never see that relationship between marketing and your quality of life. Now, that doesn't apply obviously if you're just buying Zillow leads or whatever because the whole point of marketing I feel, I'm biased, but I feel is to build a personal brand that makes people want to call you. You're not necessarily calling them, they're calling you. But Tara, to your point, if you structure things the right way, you can set up a business where you're still present in your marriage, in your kids' lives, at your school, community, church, etc. You can be a rockstar selling real estate, but you have to get that marketing part right where people are calling you and they want to work with you specifically. 

Lauren Rocco: For sure. I think it's like you have to put a face behind the name too. There's lots of different ways to market inside of real estate. Some people choose to go away where it's like that person doesn't care who you are, what you have going on, whatever. They just want somebody to be available immediately to open the door. 

Lauren Rocco: Quite frankly, as an industry, we've conditioned clients in general to feel like we should be at their beck and call. But once you put that person and, to your point, that brand behind it, then people do respect that. They are like, “You know what? I'll wait.” I mean, let's be honest, real estate does not need to be a 24/7 game. We all act like it does, but especially in a market like right now, it's like nothing is going to happen at 11:30 at night that can't be taken care of at 7:00 in the morning or 8:00 in the morning or 9:00 in the morning. Let's stop acting like that. 

Tim Chermak: Yep. I think the reason so many agents work crazy hours like that, or they'll take a call or they'll return a text at 10:30 PM is that you go so long sometimes without closings that interacting with a client and texting, even if it's not a client, even it's just a lead, texting a lead gives you that dopamine rush of feeling like you're accomplishing something when in reality, it's like, well, if that's your definition of success, then I don't want success

Jamie Tulak: It's desperation at that point. 

Tim Chermak: All of you have built extremely successful real estate businesses completely independent of each other, because all of you were doing really well before you ever founded Girls With Grit. Would you mind just sharing, and I'll ask this question independently, Jamie, Lauren, and Tara, what was your preferred lead source? Or if you could almost narrow it down to one thing, how did you grow your business to becoming successful before Girls With Grit was ever a thing?

Jamie Tulak: We actually coach about this inside our community. I think we all have overlaying similarities. But for me, mostly it was through doing community events in my neighborhood, so like garage sales or a fall festival, doing things like that. And then of course, social media is always good because it's just keeping people in your ecosystem and becoming five mile famous. For me, that's the basis of my business.

Tim Chermak: Jamie, did you use paid ads at all or direct mail or Zillow or was it all really in person, live networking in the community? 

Jamie Tulak: We talked about this before we went live on this podcast. For me, with doing ads, I've done ads, but it's more just like a supplement, just getting a little bit, scraping more people and putting them in the top of my funnel, not necessarily my sole focus. I've done paid ads. I obviously do mailings and stuff within my farm neighborhood that I market. No, definitely never did Zillow or anything like that. I don't buy leads, so it's mostly just organic staying-in-front-of-people that are local here, that I wanna work with, that I like working with, that live in my neighborhood, that see me, and it's just being omnipresent with those types of people. 

Tim Chermak: If you listen to the show, you'll know that I love specifics. Would you mind sharing how many homes you sold last year or what your GCI was last year? 

Jamie Tulak: The three of us also, we've ran really big businesses, but since starting Girls With Grit, we're in that situation where it was like, yeah, we, at one point, sold 80, 90 houses, and then it swings and the pendulum's over here. Now, our time's more focused heavily on the coaching space. Will I ever step out of selling? Probably not, but last year, my GCI was close to $300,000. But at the peak of my real estate career anyways, it wouldn't be uncommon to bring home $450,000. $500,000 a year. 

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