There's Quality In The Quantity

David Recendez:
I've used other services like Boomtown. I've used Zillow. And like you were saying, if you have a credit card, you're going to get leads. No doubt about it. But the thing is, after you stop paying for them, you're not building anything. You're not building a brand. And if you want a company that'll really help you build a brand in your community and really turn ordinary people into absolute superstars, then this is what Platform's going to do to you.

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 the founder and CEO of Platform. I love marketing and I talk too much. So let's dive in. Hey guys, it's Tim Chermak and welcome back to another episode of the Platform Marketing Show. I'm joined today with David Recendez and his wife Gracia.

David Recendez:
Yeah. Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Chermak:
Cool, man. So I'm really excited to have this conversation here because you are a really awesome example of someone who already was fairly successful. I know that before you joined Platform a couple years ago, your GCI was around a $100,000 or so, which means you're a top agent. The vast majority of agents actually never eclipse a 100,000 in GCI. And within a year of starting Platform, your GCI grew closer to 200,000. I think you said it was about 180,000 in your first full year of Platform. And this year as we're recording it, halfway through the year, you were already at 180,000. So this year you're going to be closer to probably 300. I mean, potentially who knows? Maybe even 350,000, and that's starting from a place where before the Platform marketing strategy, you were closer to a 100,000.

So, I mean, you are one of those people where very literally Platform has not just doubled, but actually tripled you and your wife's business. So that's phenomenal. So, David, how did you first hear about Platform? Was it a webinar or a Facebook ad, or did someone tell you about Platform? How did you first even hear about this Platform marketing strategy?

David Recendez:
Oh, definitely. Tim, I started about a year and a half ago. And one of the things that I really wanted to do is I just didn't know where my next closing was coming from. And so I really wanted to change my marketing and I really wanted to revamp my business to where it wasn't so much hope, it was more strategic.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, you have an actual system.

David Recendez:
An actual system in place. And I feel like a lot of agents there, they're really living by hope. These past two years, we've seen the market really shift up and down. And for me personally, I didn't want to succumb to that. I wanted a system in place and I knew that investing into marketing was something that I needed to do. Prior to that, I was investing about a $1,000 a year in marketing.

Tim Chermak:
So basically nothing then?

David Recendez:
Basically nothing. And so I figured out from the get-go obviously if you want to be a top producing agent, you have to invest in your business. You can't just live by hope and you have to get out there in the community. And so at the beginning of last year, Gary Hernandez, which is a local agent here in Winston Salem, he showed one of my listings. And I had known about Gary from friends and also from another loan officer, a mutual loan officer that we were working with.

Tim Chermak:
But Gary's not with your brokerage, right?

David Recendez:
No, he's with Keller Williams. And so my wife and I, we opened up cloud Realty three years ago. So we're an independent firm and a year and a half ago, I had this conversation with Gary and I was like, hey, what exactly are you doing to produce these numbers? Because I had heard he was doing really well for himself. He had grown quite a bit. And one of the things that really impacted me and shocked me the most about this conversation was the willingness, even though we were of competition, the willingness to really recommend Platform. I had this conversation and he was telling me and he was like, you seriously have to check out Platform marketing. That's all I do. I don't invest into anything else. Any other marketing strategy. Platform has completely transformed my business. And from the get-go I noticed just by the conversation we are in a real estate business. So it's very cutthroat a lot of agents. Sometimes when they have a really good resource, they don't want to share it. Because they don't want their competition to have that edge.

Tim Chermak:
If you have some amazing marketing strategy, you don't want to tell other agents in your community about it because you want that to be your advantage. And that's obviously a huge part of why Platform gives market exclusivity, right? Is because we know that agents don't want another agent who's two miles away to be running the exact same ads as them and similar marketing strategies. That's why we give exclusivity. And that's why it's really cool that Gary Hernandez had that big of just an abundance mentality with you, or he's not even at your brokerage, you're at Cloud and he's at KW and he had this abundance mentality and he is willing to share with you, oh yeah, you should check out this Platform program because it's killing it for me.

David Recendez:
No, exactly. And that's one of the things that I knew, I was like this whole Platform system is this obviously different from other systems. Because if you have a credit card, you can pay for leads. And everybody's competing after that low hanging fruit leads, Zillow leads and everything else. But I knew there was something to this system after that conversation that I had with him and obviously that mindset that he had, that willingness to help other agents. And I wanted to be part of something like that. And so after I had the conversation with Gary, he was like, hey, let's grab some coffee. I want to show you what the CRMs all about. And personally, I'm not the best at videos. And he even told me himself, he was like, one of the things I absolutely hate is shooting videos, but they'll give you the script.
They'll tell you exactly what to do and anybody can shoot a video. And so I was really attracted to that and I was like, wow, here's a person in Winston, Salem really close to me, his business is blowing up and he's willing to help me out with this. I have to check it out. And so that's when I stumbled upon the documentary that you guys had on your website.

Tim Chermak:
Oh yeah. Yep.

David Recendez:
Yeah. And that's one of the things, I ordered your book. I read your high hanging fruit.

Tim Chermak:
And by the way, for people listening to this, we filmed that documentary now six years ago. So it's like six years old, and we're actually working on a new one and we're going to have a new documentary come out by the end of this year. We're about 90% done filming it. And now it's in post-production with the production company working on all of the editing and everything. So the plan is to premiere it actually at the Platform mastermind in December in a movie theater, which will be pretty cool to show off the new documentary, literally in a movie theater with popcorn and everything. But we have all new stories from new clients that have started with the Platform strategy just in the last year or two. So it's going to be pretty cool. I'm excited for it.

David Recendez:
Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. I mean that documentary really hit the foundation of what Platform is all about. And it truly convinced me after reading your book, after learning about the system, the whole we plant the seed, we're going to have to cultivate it and eventually we will reap it. It may not be in two months, it may not be in three months, but after these leads, after the people that click on our ads, that they keep seeing us over and over again, they're going to be fully convinced that we are in real estate and we are the top agents. And that's the difference that I saw versus what I was doing before, because I was paying for leads before. I would shoot random Facebook ads. There were blind list homes. I was getting short with leads, but one of the biggest things for me was I would call these leads and be like, who are you?
What did I sign up for? I don't know who you are. And it was awful. And the conversion, we had to learn how to cold call and I'm going to be honest, Tim, I haven't cold called in a year and a half. Just because people are coming to me now, instead of me having to pump the phones, which is perfectly fine. I know that any system will work if you work it, if you envision yourself to three, four years down the road, it's working 60 hours cold calling, I mean it'll work. But for me personally, I just didn't want that system for my future. And so whenever I read your book about the high hanging fruit cultivating these leads and eventually reaping the harvest, I mean, I was just hooked.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. I mean the entire high hanging fruit philosophy is the old fashioned way of doing marketing before all of these cool new modern technologies came along with Facebook and pixel tracking and retargeting and the ability to run split tests on landing pages and sub segment all of your custom audiences. And you can get so granular with all of the modern digital marketing tactics. And what I felt was missing in the industry is why I wrote that book. And it's why we've built Platform the way that we've built it. Is too many people were getting attached to these modern technology tactics of, oh, I can queue people up on 50 autoresponder drip emails and running all of these targeted ads. It's like, but that's not part of an overall strategy, all the tactics in the world really aren't going to move the needle for you. And so what I felt people were forgetting specifically in real estate where there's a long sales cycle. Right?
Usually when someone clicks on your ad, they're not actually ready to go buy a house or sell their house for another three, four or five months. It's not like someone clicks your ad because they're thinking of listing their house this weekend. Right? If someone's actually ready to either buy or sell and they're going to do something within the week, it means that you've probably missed your chance. 99% of the time if someone's going to do something in the next week, they're already working with a realtor. And so you just shouldn't worry about picking up that type of business with ads because those people are already working with realtors. What marketing can do really, really well if you set it up the right way in the context of this high hanging fruit philosophy with all of the retargeting ads that we run and just the sequence of content that we create is you want to build a future pipeline where you always know you can look ahead and you always know you'll have business coming in three months from now four months from now, five months from now.
Because eventually once you get to three, four, five, months from now, that business becomes right now business. But then you can look another three, four, five months from now and you always have that pipeline. I think a lot of agents were just forgetting about the fundamentals of marketing, because they were just obsessed with cold calling expired listings, cold calling FSBOs. And as soon as you started applying technology to all of this where you could sign up for softwares, that would give you the numbers of the expired's and the FSBOs to call. And you could target Google ads and Facebook ads with such pinpoint precision of specific zip codes and everything that agents lost track of the overall big picture marketing philosophy, that has worked for agents for decades, which is building a brand in a community where people actually recognize you and you're getting referrals. And I just thought, well, perhaps the most strategic use of all these cool new digital marketing weapons should be using your marketing to build a brand versus just using it to build a bunch of leads.
Because Facebook ads, digital marketing and Google ads, YouTube, whatever those are just tools, they're tactics. But they're a neutral in the sense that they're tools are tactics, but you can use those in the service of a more long-term strategy. And that's what I think creates the most interesting results. I actually just right before we started recording, I was a little bit late to this podcast recording because I had to wrap up a sales call actually with an agent who just signed up for Platform, which was cool. But yeah, what I said on that call is that if you're thinking you're going to get quick business out of Platform, because I always try to be just brutally honest with people. I never want someone to sign up with the wrong expectations. So I will tell them, if you need quick business, you truly need some quick cash.
You need some quick closings in the next 90 days. If you're judging Platform by how much business will you bring in the next 90 days, don't sign up for Platform because we will not get you an avalanche of closings in the first 90 days. If you truly need quick business, you should pound the pavement, go out and door knock for sale by owners, call expired listings, really work your sphere. Call around asking for referrals, sit open houses on the weekends. You're not going to pick up quick business with a long-term marketing strategy. But if you can zoom out and take a longer view of your marketing plan and think, okay, I'm not optimizing to get quick business in the next month or two, but how do I optimize to build my business more for the long-term? If you're more so looking at a six month plus window of what is the most effective marketing strategy in six plus months, Platform I think blows everything else out of the water.

David Recendez:
No, and that's exactly what it is. Because from the get-go, I had to undergo a mindset shift and I was trained years ago that if people aren't ready now, don't focus on them, focus on the people that are ready now and convert them and turn them into transactions. But the thing is, what about those people, perhaps they're not ready right now, but they're ready in three months? We're not top of mind then, they're going to forget about us and then they're going to go with another agent that's consistent with that cultivating process. So from the get-go, I had to change my mindset to where creating ads and being able to cultivate these leads is so essential and it's so fundamental. And if we don't understand I guess the foundation and of what Platform is, we're really going to miss so much opportunity. And I think last year I produced about 24 ads during the whole year. And right now in August, we're already at 72.

Tim Chermak:
That's awesome, dude. That's awesome.

David Recendez:
And that shift came from the mastermind.

Tim Chermak:
So that means you've averaged nine ads a month, nine new retargeting ads.

David Recendez:
Yeah. Every single month. And we prioritize it because we're still working with the people that are currently ready. I guess 70% of our time is focused on those people that are currently ready. But also we can't forget to not shoot ads. We can't forget to do what Platform will provide for us. And I remember having a conversation with Jordan several months ago, she was like, Platform isn't a all you can eat buffet, but if we're not providing the food, if we're not cultivated, if we're not shooting our ads, if we're not producing every single month, then we're really missing just so much opportunity. And that's where a lot of agents, like you're saying, if you're expecting results in 30, 60, 90 days, you are going to get some results and I did get results. The first couple of ads, I got some listings, I got people that were interested.
I just got used to that. I guess that instant gratification, which is what a lot of people get used to and they want those leads. And I know people whenever I would talk to them about marketing services, the first thing they would ask me is how many leads does it provide you every single month? Yeah.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. It's all about the leads, leads, leads, leads, leads.

David Recendez:
Yeah, exactly. Are you getting a hundred leads a month or 200 leads a month? And some are even like, they'll provide you 5,000 leads a month or whatever it may be. But to me, I didn't want to build a short-term business, I wanted to build a long-term sustainable business.

Tim Chermak:
You want a brand that kicks off dividends for the long-term. Just the way that if you look at most non-profits and endowments, the whole point is that they want to build up that endowment so that if you typically can rely on a 5% yield a year from a big endowment fund, like a non-profit knows that if they want to have an annual operating budget, let's say of half a million dollars a year to pay for staff and all their outreach programs for whatever the non-profit is doing, whether it's a church ministry, a local inner-city school mentoring program, whatever it is, let's say that you have an annual operating budget that you know do the work that you want to do in that non-profit, you need $500,000 a year. Either you can go out and try to raise $500,000 every year from one time donations and have to repeat that process every year, right? Or the more longer term thinking people do is they say, hey, let's go out and raise a big time endowment.
So it'll take more work up front because we'll probably have to raise 10 million dollars, but 5% of 10 million is half a million a year. So we can raise the 10 million essentially all at once. And that 10 million in interest, if we invest it conservatively, we'll kick off 5% a year. And then that will fund the entire operations of the non-profit. So the non-profit or that foundation can exist in perpetuity and we never have to worry about the stress of having to fundraise every year just to pay the bills because you live off of the yield of the endowment. I think for a for-profit business, your endowment is your brand. The brand is the thing that you invest in once, it's an upfront work. I shouldn't say once as if you can run one ad and then it's good. Obviously you have to continue running retargeting ads, but 90% of the big time investment is the first year or two that you're doing. It's to build that brand and that reputation in your community.
And then that reputation kicks off referrals and inbound leads for basically the rest of your career. Because once you have that reputation as being a well respected realtor, let's say near high point North Carolina, which is near where you are. It's not like you have to constantly be running billboards or spending a ton of money on marketing once you get to that point because people trust you. And running retargeting ads and just maintaining contact with your database and your sphere is a lot cheaper than generating new leads every month. That's the point I'm making is that over time it actually gets more efficient, not less, because your brand is that endowment. And so if more agents started thinking about it that way, I think their businesses would grow a lot more over the long-term. I mean you mentioned David, the documentary where you read the book, High Hanging Fruit, you watched our documentary we produced, those were not cheap to create, but this proves my point of we spent over $50,000 just creating that documentary.
And if we were to do it now, it would actually cost well over a $100,000, because that was six years ago. So people's fees are all way more now, but we paid that once and that has helped us build a multi-million dollar company that has hundreds of clients now across the country. And so when you look at the big picture, that $50,000 we spent creating that asset is insignificant because it creates long-term dividends. The same thing with writing that book, I didn't necessarily pay to write the book. I didn't hire a ghost writer or anything. I actually wrote that book myself, the old fashioned way, where you sit down and write a book, but it took me six months. So whatever the value my time was for that six months, that was a huge upfront time investment to create that content.
But we've sent out thousands of copies of that book since we published it and people sign up for Platform all the time. We literally just had someone sign up yesterday who told me, you know what? I'm finally calling you, but I signed up for your book four years ago. So they've technically been high hanging fruit themselves for four years. And finally they decided that, hey, I'm going to give this a shot. So we follow the same marketing philosophy even in how we've built Platform, which is you invest upfront in creating that marketing momentum and in long-term that'll pay far greater dividends than just buying a bunch of leads from Zillow or buying leads from realtor.com or being reliant on outside sources for lead floats, it's always better to invest in building your own marketing assets and investing in your own brand and that creates dividends of its own.
So David, in the last year and a half, because you said you've been with Platform for about 18 months. What have been the most effective ads that you've run specifically for lead generation? What's been your favorite lead gen ad? And then let me know what's maybe a couple of your favorite retargeting ads that you've run, whether they're photos or videos.

David Recendez:
So some of our favorite ads are the ones where we ran the economics in one lesson, the trucker videos, those have been some of the most effective ads in regards to producing results. We're getting results because the business owners are sharing those ads. We're not doing any plugins at the end of the video or whenever we showcase a small business, we don't plug ourselves in or make sure you use Cloud Realty as your next real estate firm. We strictly just focus on providing value for that business and really just getting involved in the community. And those have been some of the most effective ads that we have shot personally, just because in the community business owners are the ones that are most tied to everybody else. They're tied to other business owners, they're tied to people and they'll refer you out.
And I guess going back to that previous conversation that you were mentioning, you wrote the book and six years down the road it's still producing results, the documentary as well. And I feel like a lot of agents, they're just so used to that mentality of what am I going to get out of this? What value am I going to get out of showcasing a small business? Or they're just so tied into that, that they're missing such great opportunities by doing so. And going back to that I guess changing my mindset was not to expect immediate results, but it's going to be an exponential explosion eventually. I personally, I would invest a thousand... I mentioned to you right before this podcast a $1,000 a year. And then I would be like, okay, how many leads am I going to get out of this? And that's where people they're scared to showcase a business or even some of the listing towards that we've shot aren't even our listings.

Tim Chermak:
Exactly, exactly. Because no one remembers that they're your listing, they just see you or they see your wife Gracia on video, right? And they just assume it must be your listing because you're the agent on video. So they assume that you must be really successful and you have all these listings and it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I know another thing you mentioned David was that one of the side benefits of Platform is that the composition of your business has changed. So you're no longer only working with a bunch of buyers, you have a lot more listings in your business than before you were with Platform. Can you share with me how that's worked and what do you think is driving that shift to where you're seeing more listings with Platform?

David Recendez:
I really do believe that it just comes down to the adding the service part of it that other agents aren't doing. I mentioned to you right before the podcast that the majority of agents, probably over 90% of agents, their strategy is put on the MLS, put their sign in front of the yard and wait for it to sell. Now we're able to showcase videos and people in the community are seeing these videos, are seeing that exposure. We just shot a video I think a couple of weeks ago, it had 73,000 views, a listing video, like 200 comments. It blew up and it wasn't even our listing. I mean, we put $500 behind that listing. It wasn't even our listing, it was somebody else's, we reached out and we were like, hey, can we borrow your listing? We'd love to showcase that we do have some buyers that would be interested in it.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. Yep.

David Recendez:
And by doing so, it's just crazy. The results that we got by doing that, we would get phone calls from buyers that would tell us, hey, and this listing was about $650,000, and they were like, you know what? My budget, I can only go up to 550,000. Can you help me out?

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. Exactly. Of course, we can.

David Recendez:
Yeah, exactly. It's like, of course we can help you out, but it wasn't even our listing. We put the 500 behind it, we got the exposure and we got buyers from it. We got listings from it. We got people telling us, hey, can you showcase? I had a couple of months ago, about two months ago, I had a lady. She was in the parking lot. My wife was with my son, Eli. He was sick and so she wasn't in the office. And so I was out doing some showings and she gave me a call and she was like, I really want to list my house with you. And I was like, well, I'm going to be in the office in maybe a couple of hours. You can come back then or you can come back another day. She was like, I'm not leaving the parking lot until we have a listing agreement signed, just see that impact.
And then that never ever happened to me before. Whereas sellers would be in my parking lot, they'd be waiting for me for a listing agreement. And they were like, I'm not going to leave the parking lot because I know the exposure that you provide on some of the listings, some of the videos would get 40,000 views. We just shot another one 20,000 views, a ton of exposure, value that we weren't adding before Platform.

Tim Chermak:
Yep. And getting listings becomes so much easier when you have that confidence that when you meet with people, that they are already impressed with your marketing. So they just inherently already want to be working with you. You don't have to convince them, they already want to work with you. Right? What makes Platform work over the long-term? This is also something I say on a lot of sales calls. I have with agents who are interested in hiring Platform is eventually what happens when someone's been seeing all of these retargeting ads for two months, three months, four months, they don't necessarily verbalize this. So they're not going to say it out loud, but what's happening is psychologically, they're thinking holy smokes, I'm seeing David pop up in my newsfeed every day. I see his posts all the time. Right? He's clearly really good at marketing and promoting himself. He's clearly very good at marketing himself.
And if he's that good at marketing himself, I bet he's really good at selling homes too. Because people can make that logical connection without you necessarily having to say it. Right? They can just connect the dots that if you're that good at marketing yourself, that's the kind of agent they'd probably want to work with to sell their house because clearly you're really good at sales and marketing. So over time we're creating that reputation for you with everyone on your retargeting list. And so it shouldn't be surprising that frankly, if you do this and you're creating, I mean, like you said, nine new retargeting ads every month and your business is going to double and eventually triple, right? Because everyone in your community, in your sphere, is seeing proof pop up in their newsfeed on Facebook constantly that David's really, really good at marketing. So, of course, they would want to work with you as their agent.
And that's why I tell people like, hey, this is not going to change your life in 90 days, right? Because we can't reach all that many people in just one or two months. But long-term when you really zoom out and look at the six month plus perspective of people that have been with Platform, because that's a common theme of almost everyone I interview on this podcast is they've been with Platform at least a year. That's when you typically see the massive results come in as 12 months plus, the big time results where we double or triple someone's business, that doesn't happen in the first six months. Right? But the issue is so many agents when they sign up for a marketing program, they don't maybe say this, they don't word it this way, but really what they're looking for is a lead gen program. They want leads, leads, leads, because they want a bunch of closings in the first six months.
And there's almost an inverse relationship with how good a lead gen program is with how good it's going to be long-term. Because again, if you need quick business, yeah, you can set up a bunch of expired listing phone calls and subscribe to one of those services that gives you expired listings to call or that lets you know where all the FSBOs are in your area so you don't have to manually look them up and you can do that and you might pick up some quick business, but as soon as you stop doing that, all the benefit stops. Or as soon as you stop paying Zillow or stop paying realtor.com, the leads stop overnight. There isn't any residual long-term effect of that. Once you stop paying them, the marketing stops and the results stop. With this Platform strategy, you're actually building equity in your long-term brand the same way that you build equity in a house.
So even after you're done paying your mortgage, you own the house, there's equity there. It's kind of the same thing the way we set up this marketing plan, where God forbid, I mean, I don't want you to ever quit Platform. I'd love to keep working with you for five years, 10 years. Right? But I mean, theoretically, if you were to ever quit Platform, that brand that we've helped you build is going to last for years and years. That's a long-term asset that you'll have, that massive sphere and database and retargeting list that we've built, that doesn't disappear overnight. It's something that you actually own, it's an asset. So that's just a really important point I try to get people to understand is that this is playing the long game, right?
We are optimizing for how wealthy can we make you in 12 to 18 months, not how wealthy we can make you in 90 days because you will be blown away at how much more money you'll make over your career if you take that long-term approach versus getting greedy and thinking like, oh, I need some quick closings. How much can I make in the next month or two? And I think your story, David, is proof of that. So I want to go back to talking about the number of retargeting ads you do because I'm taking some notes here and I was blown away when you said that you've already done over 70 new ads this year. I mean, how do you create time to do that? Because I'm sure you don't find time. There's no way you can find time to be launching nine new ads every month.
Are you scheduling a time block for on Fridays we create content or on Monday mornings we create content. Or what does that schedule look like to you? What would you say to I know the realtors who are listening to this podcast right now where they're shaking their heads, thinking, holy shit, there is no way I have time to create that many new photos or videos every month. How do you do it?

David Recendez:
Well, one of the biggest thing is we're going to make time for whatever we prioritize in our life. I actually just had a call with another agent because they were in the same boat. They were like, how do you find time to shoot so many ads?

Tim Chermak:
Sure.

David Recendez:
And one of the things that I told them is if we don't schedule a day, for me personally, Wednesday, I have to have all my ads done. And I actually have a document, a Google docs where I check mark, I'll schedule out the whole month of ads and I'll check mark it as soon as I finish it. But by Wednesday, it's my due date, Wednesday is ad day. And by doing so I make the time because I already know I schedule around that timeframe because we are busy people.
There are other agents extremely busy and if we don't make time for this, we will never shoot the ads. And that's what I found myself doing last year, I was extremely busy. I was still producing, but I wasn't doing my ads because I didn't have it set. I didn't have a system in place. I didn't have just a strategy behind producing these ads. And one of the most monumental moments that really changed me on the inside was the mastermind that we had in Naples. After hearing, you say up your ads to 1500, make sure you produce more ads, make sure you put $500 behind listing toward on top of the 1,500, after hearing all that, after being surrounded just by the Plat fam and just people that are showing for the same goal, I remember meeting with Jordan right after that.
And I was like, one of the biggest things that I needed for this next year is accountability. And I feel like we all in some form or fashion, we need somebody that'll keep us accountable. And so I was like Jordan, and Jordan is so nice. She won't get on to me know she's super nice, but I'm like Jordan, if I don't give you the two ads any week, because my goal is two ads every single week for 52 weeks. If I don't turn in these two ads, get on to me, keep me accountable.
And I'm not perfect some weeks I didn't so the next week I would have to make up for it, but now it's just such a habit that I know Wednesday is ad day and if I'm not producing these two ads, then I feel like, what am I doing? If I went back to just producing the one ad or two ads every single month, I don't know, I think that would be just shocking. It wouldn't be hard at all. You know what I mean? I mean, that's what changed me, it's set a day, make sure you have a plan and do it.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. I mean, I think the feedback loop is really important because everyone intellectually knows they can grasp it at a theoretical level that the more content I create over the long-term the more my business is going to grow. I think everyone would agree with that statement. That's not like controversial, it's not rocket science. The more content you create, the more retargeting ads you have, probably the more your business is going to grow. So it's not that people don't believe that or that they question the validity of that, it purely comes down to making the time to do it. So just logical process of deduction, I ask the next question, well, if you believe it's true, why aren't you doing it? I think it's that gap, this time period, that everyone will experience between when they start creating a lot more ads and content versus when they actually see the results.
And usually that takes six months. So if you start out in a fury of just creating a ton of ads, it's not like your business is going to blow up in the next four to six weeks or even the next eight weeks or even the next 12 weeks. It's not because the ads aren't working when you really up the quantity of content and the number of ads that you're putting out, it's that the people in your retargeting list that doesn't magically speed up their timeline, right? Just because they're seeing a wider variety of ads from you does not mean that they're going to decide to buy or sell a month sooner. It just means that when they are ready to go, you're massively increasing the odds and the probability that they will want to work with you specifically and not other agents.
So when you increase the amount of content, maybe the most straightforward way that I can word this is, increasing the amount of content doesn't necessarily increase the amount of lead flow, but it can massively increase the lead conversion percentage, because a way higher percentage of the leads on your retargeting list are going to feel like, hey, I want to work with David Recendez specifically because I'm seeing him constantly. And he's clearly really, really good at marketing himself because I see him popping up in my newsfeed all the time and I want to work with a successful realtor who's that good at marketing themselves because they're probably really, really good at marketing and selling homes too, if they're that good at promoting themselves. And so the more ads you put out, you're improving the lead conversion percentage, not necessarily the number of leads that you're generating, but nothing I said there has anything to do with time, right? Time is an ingredient, it's not a metric.
So that's something that we've talked about in previous podcasts where people often use time to measure marketing the same way that they measure the number of leads or what's the email open rate as if it's just one of many metrics. How long have you been doing this? What's the lead conversion rate within three months or six months? And we look at time as being an ingredient in the process. Your ads budget is an ingredient, it's not really a metric, right? Because what I know is that the longer you stick with this, time is almost like oxygen with the fire. It's the fuel to the fire. Right? You need time just like you need ads budget because you can have the biggest ads budget in the world, but if you're looking at hey, how many closings did I get in 90 days?
It's like, I don't care if you launched a hundred ads in 90 days, if you literally launched one new retargeting ad a day for 90 days, that's not going to change the fact that most of the people's timeline of all those leads on your retargeting list may not be ready to go for three, four, five months. So if you're only looking at a two month window or a 90 day window, you're just not looking big picture enough on how long it's actually going to take to get a return on that. But if you combine these two magical forces, which is time as an ingredient and a lot of retargeting ads, that's where you see the massive results. Because that's where all these people long-term on your retargeting list, when they're ready to go, they've been seeing you so constantly that they're going to want to work with you. And that's why you're obviously one of those examples, David, of a Platform agent who has basically tripled their business since starting the Platform marketing program.
Basically the point I'm making on that rant is that you have to have the courage and the perseverance to stick with it those first six months where you're not necessarily seeing the result of all those ads you're creating, you have to trust us that six months from now, it's going to be worth it. Because that high hanging fruit will start falling. And it's that six month gap that prevents people from ever seeing the results long-term, because way too many people will try it for two months and then they'll say, oh, it didn't work. And then they slow down the ads. It's like, well, you only did it for two months. That's starting a workout program and going to the gym two times and being like, why don't I have a six pack? It's like, well, it takes six months or more.

David Recendez:
Yeah. And it goes back to I guess the premise of just consistency. Like producing ads every single week, it does get boring some weeks, sometimes you won't see results, but being able to endure, I guess the boring stuff is what's going to get you to success because a lot of people, for example, what you were just saying with the working out, a lot of people that hit up the gym for a month at the beginning of the year, for example, two weeks, I think I saw a statistic that was like 97% of people that set goals in January quit by the third week of January. And that's because people are expecting quick results by doing just these drastic changes in their life. But if you just make small changes every single day, every single week. And one of the things that we were interacting on that email is I'm not really so much focused on the GCI, which I should be, but I'm more focused on the results and the changes that I'm seeing in my mindset and my business people are recognizing me.
I'm starting to shift into, I used to be very buyer heavy and now it's an extreme balance. Truly my wife and I, we love real estate and it's just an amazing feeling, but it's something that a lot of people need to understand that it doesn't happen overnight. Every single day, if you shoot your videos, and that's another thing that I wanted to mention too, is people are driven by fear. One of the biggest challenges for me last year was I kept telling myself I'm not very good at shooting videos. I would compare myself to other agents. I would see how amazing they would be in front of the camera. I'm not very good in front of the camera and it would take me a long time to shoot these videos. I think the first video took three to four hours, it took us four hours to shoot the video.
But just every single month, if you just keep shooting videos, eventually you're going to become really good at it. Now we just did a listing tour last week with a drone shot and everything, it took us I think 30 minutes to shoot the whole video and in comparison to the four hours, you know what I mean? And so that's where people, don't be driven by fear and just keep working at the craft because the results don't really come... A lot of people want to be ready right away. They want to have the best gear, they want to have microphones and a whole crew. They want to have everything set up for success. Where in reality, all you need is a phone. You don't need much more. You don't need an expensive professional camera. You don't need a photographer. You don't need a crew. You don't need mics. You don't need any of that. Just pull out your phone, record the video and keep doing that over and over again. And you're going to be really good at shooting videos.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, you just need interesting content and do it consistently. I think everyone thinks that every video they do has to be viral or every post I do has to just blow up. It's like, no, it doesn't. The most important thing is consistency. Frankly, it's better to be filming multiple new retargeting ads a week, whether they're photos or videos, even if none of them ever go viral, they don't need to absolutely blow up and get thousands of likes or tens of thousands of video views. As long as you consistently are putting stuff out there, that person's business is going to grow a lot more than someone who has one viral video, but then is radio silent the rest of the year and they're not putting out regular new retargeting ads. So it's about the consistency over time. Again, time is an ingredient in the Platform marketing process, it's not just a metric, it's an ingredient, an active ingredient in the process.
So David, what are some of the Platform agents that you most look up to in the Plat fam group that you're like, hey, I would really love to emulate the way that they do marketing or how they are doing things, or I'm really impressed with their success. Who are a couple of people that you look up to as being worth emulating?

David Recendez:
Well, I met Neil Cox at the beginning of the year and we were connecting every single month. I took him on as a mentor and we would connect every month and we would just go back and forth and he would give me some tips and we would just discuss because I've seen his success and that's something that I wanted to emulate. I would ask him, hey, and he said, I saw my success after a year and a half. And that's really what motivated me to keep going. After seeing these people that are extremely successful, reach their success not really in 30 or 90 days, but rather in a year or a year and a half is what really just kept me motivated to keep going. And so Neil Cox is somebody that I really look up to. My wife connected with Karen Batio, she has an amazing strategy.

Tim Chermak:
Yep, Karen out in Missouri. Yep. Karen. Yep.

David Recendez:
Yeah. She has an amazing follow up strategy that she shared with her. And my wife she handles a lot of the leads. She does the follow-up, the cultivating process and just being surrounded by those people and really being part of this Platform family, where agents truly care about you. They want to see you succeed. I see people, they post about their videos, what they need and their agents will comment, hey, you don't actually need all this gear. All you need is a phone. And if you have questions, like being surrounded just by people that generally care about you and they want to see you succeed is something that is so genuine and so inspiring.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. I think the element of the Platform experience, I mean we slang, we call it the Platform for Platform family, and it's super cliche. I always tell that to new agents joining the Platform family that I say, hey, we call it the Plat fam and I know it's really cheesy and cliche, but once you're around it for a couple of weeks or a couple months, I think you'll get it, you'll get that this isn't just some random Facebook group or it's not just some random group of realtors, there is truly a sense of community here because everyone's market is exclusive. So no one feels threatened by anyone else that like, oh, I don't want to give away my secrets or help out my competition. There is really honestly an abundance mentality in the group and agents are willing to help each other out because you mentioned that Neil really inspired you to stick with it and just think long-term about it.
And that really inspired you. And now look at the year that you're having, right? Well, Neil had someone do that for him too. I think it was maybe originally Jill Lightfoot. And so it's almost this chain of when someone mentors you and helps you get perspective on the Platform marketing strategy and it eventually works for you, you kind of feel like, okay, I'm going to pay it forward and I'm going to help the next generation of people coming in to implement this strategy and keep it going. So it is a really cool sense of community we have that I don't think other companies or other organizations have because we have this unique business model of only working with one agent per market. So David, let me shift the conversation a little bit and ask you a different question. What is your ads budget look like on a monthly basis and what are you typically spending on the ads campaigns?

David Recendez:
$1,500 every single month. I upped it from $750 after the mastermind. All last year, I was at $750 a month, and then after the mastermind, I talked to Jordan, I was like, hey, let's do the leap of faith. We're going to do the work. Let's up it up. Let's up it to 1,500 a month. Now sometimes I'm going to be honest, Tim, I go over that.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah, sure.

David Recendez:
I'll add the $500 on top of that on the listing tour. I think in June we had two listings where we added 500 each. And so I think in the whole June we spent $2,600 on ads. So we went a little overboard then, but it is just that whole mentality, that mind shift that I'm mentioning is now I'm not really so interested in upping my lifestyle, everything we make, we reinvest back into marketing. But we just added some billboards and to connect I guess that physical presence they'll tie it up with the digital. They see us. I had a conversation with a client a couple of days ago where she's like, oh my gosh, you're all over Facebook. And also we saw your billboard and we see you there and we really want to work with you. And so being able to tie everything together is really important, but it also involves a good marketing budget.

Tim Chermak:
Yeah. That very simply explains a lot of your success. It's not a coincidence that in the year you doubled your ads budget from about 750 a month to 1,500 a month on the ad spend. That's not a coincidence that your business has blown up the way it has, right? Because way too many agents will have an advertising budget of 500 or $600 a month, and they're like, why is my business not doubling? Or why is my business not tripling? And then we look at their ads account or we look at what they've been doing, and it's like, well, you're expecting unrealistic results from a $600 a month ad budget, right? $600 a month was a lot of money five years ago on an ad's budget. But there's been a lot of inflation in the last five years. And also on top of just core economic inflation, Facebook's prices have increased for CPMs over the last five years.
So honestly, to get the same equivalent of a $600 ads budget, you need to be spending probably $1,200 now. And so I think a lot of people just haven't upgraded their investment relative to the reality of where things are at now. So a large part of your results are frankly that you're spending $1,500 a month on ads. I've really yet to see anyone at Platform spend $1,500 a month on ads long-term and not have it work for them. That just doesn't happen. Because with that amount of firepower going out every month with video campaigns, listing videos, all of the retargeting ads, you are going to be successful and your business is going to snowball in a major way. So David, let me ask you a curve ball question here. What would you say to someone who's maybe doing research and they listen to maybe a couple of Platform's podcast episodes.
They watch the documentary, they checked out our website, whatever, but they're wondering what is Platform. If I hire Platform, what does Platform actually do for me? What is the Platform marketing program? How would you answer that question in your own words, having worked with us now for a year and a half, what would you say to that person when someone asks like, hey, what exactly is Platform?

David Recendez:
I mean, the way I view it is having your own marketing department that's not only going to build your brand, but also give you the tools to provide just the best service available. And so that's how I would express it because I now feel what I do as an agent is miles ahead of what any other agent in my area can provide. And not only that, but you're also getting that family aspect of mentors that are willing to help you, they're willing to share with you the tips and tools, you're adding just this immense value to all of your clients, to the community, you're building your brand, but you're also cultivating a long-term sustainable business. And there's no marketing or there's no other program available that can compare to what Platform does.

Tim Chermak:
I mean, have you seen other programs, whether it's Boomtown, Curator, Ylopo, sync, I mean obviously Zillow, things like that. How do you think Platform compares to other programs in terms of what we actually do for you on a monthly basis?

David Recendez:
Not only will you have a marketed department that'll prepare the videos, they'll give you the scripts, they'll produce the ad, they'll give you the content that you can produce, but it'll cultivate all of these leads and I've used other services like Boomtown. I've used Zillow. And like you were saying, if you have a credit card, you're going to get leads, no doubt about it.

Tim Chermak:
You can always buy leads.

David Recendez:
Stop paying for them. You're not building anything. You're not building a brand. And if you want a company that'll really help you build a brand in your community and really turn ordinary people into absolute superstars, then this is what Platform's going to do to you.

Tim Chermak:
David, what was it that we talked about at the mastermind last year? Because you mentioned you attended the masterminded in Naples we had last year. And that was really when this light bulb moment clicked for you where you thought I'm going to go all in 2022, because I don't want just average or slightly above average results, I want to be one of those top performers. And now look at you, it's in the next year and we're in August here and I'm interviewing you on the podcast as a massive success story. What was it that you learned or what was it that you experienced at the mastermind that gave you that light bulb moment?

David Recendez:
Well, it was a lesson that you shared with us into the storm concept. And a lot of it had to do with I was really challenged by fear about upping my ads budget, producing more ads. I would question what are people going to think and all of this stuff. But at the same time, after that conversation that you had with us, I just had a light bulb just turn on. And I came to my wife and I was like, wow, if we're going to commit to this, we're going to go all in. We're going to up our ads budget. We're going to overcome this fear, we're going to produce these ads. I don't really care what other people are going to say or think because eventually it really doesn't matter. I don't even watch my videos that I shoot of myself.
They don't watch them either. They shoot it and don't even pay attention to it. Because a lot of people are like, oh, you cringe or whatever it may be. But just overcoming that fear factor is what helped me the most. And not only that, Tim, at the beginning of last year too, I wrote my book, The NC Triad: Ultimate Guide To Buying And Selling Your Home. Now, I don't give away business cards, I give away copies of my book. I haven't given away a business card in a year and a half.

Tim Chermak:
Okay, cool.

David Recendez:
Yeah. And Andrew was like, you're like the first person that's ever written a book that quick. And he was telling me because he was still my account manager whenever I produced it.

Tim Chermak:
Sure. Sure.

David Recendez:
Yeah. And so being able just to add that as well is just something that I mean is phenomenal.

Tim Chermak:
Well, cool, man. I think this has been a really great podcast episode, because we've covered everything from mindset to your actual ads budget, to some of the ads that worked well for you. And even just getting down into the granular specifics of what Platform does that's different from other companies. So you can have that proper mindset because you actually understand the marketing process that we're implementing for you that's so different. So the final question I want to ask for you, David, is, if you could go back to when you initially signed up 18 months ago, knowing what you know now about what it takes to create success with Platform and getting the best return on investment possible. What would you do differently in your first six months with Platform that maybe you didn't do? But if you could go back in time, what would you do differently when you were first launching Platform?

David Recendez:
I would produce more ads and I would up my ads budget a 100%. And I actually had another agent ask me the same thing that's pretty close. What would you do differently if you went back? And I was like, just produce ads, don't be scared of it. Every single week commit to producing more content. I was producing one to two ads a month-

Tim Chermak:
And now you're doing two ads every week.

David Recendez:
Exactly. And so producing more ads is just going to create so much exposure and not being scared to up and to invest into your company.

Tim Chermak:
And when you scale that out over time, that's where I think it becomes very revealing because a lot of agents think, oh, if I'm creating two new retargeting ads every month, that's pretty good. Because most agents are doing zero obviously. But if you're going from two a month to a week, the difference is it's obviously eight ads a month versus two retargeting ads a month. So when you zoom out, what that means is you're creating the same amount of retargeting content in a year as it takes another agent four years to do. And so obviously your business is going to grow a lot more if you're creating more content in a year than another agent will create in four years, right? Just the sheer volume of different retargeting photos and videos that are popping up in people's news feeds after they click on your lead generation ads, your retargeting sequence is just so much more robust than other agencies.
That again, it's not surprising to me that you're one of those agents where your business has actually tripled after signing up for Platform. And you and I both know it's not luck, right? It's not a coincidence. It's not, oh, he had good luck. And it's like, no, it's very clearly because he's investing $1,500 a month in ads and he's creating eight new ads every single month. I mean, that's actually nine ads every month. That's been your average this year. I mean, that's phenomenal. So thank you for your time, David. I think this has been a really awesome episode and I think it's going to help a lot of agents, both people that are currently in the Platform marketing program that just need a little bit of a kick in the ass for inspiration as well as maybe people listening to us who are thinking about implementing the Platform marketing program.
I think they will have learned a lot about what it is we do and having that long-term mentality that's necessary to be successful, not just in real estate, but frankly, in any business. So thank you for your time. And guys, thank you for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of the Platform Marketing Show.