Tips from Real Estate Coach Kendra Cooke

Podcast Takeaways

• Pay it forward.
• Have a plan and do it consistently.
• Be in the relationship business.
• Stop chasing business and start attracting business.
• Test people before you hire them.

Tips from Real Estate Coach Kendra Cooke Podcast Transcript

Adam Small:
Hello and welcome back to the Real Estate Marketing Minute. I’m your host Adam Small. With us today, we have Kimberly Small and we just wrapped up a great presentation from a guest speaker today, Kendra Cook. And we need to thank Cross Country Mortgage in Greenwood for hosting the event and inviting us today. Kendra, thank you so much for joining us today. We really do appreciate it. Before we get started, I want to tell our audience a little bit about you so that they really understand you’re somebody they should be listening to. Right. and then, you know, anything that I missed, please feel free to fill in the blanks there. So, a little bit about you. You’ve been in the real estate industry for about 30 years now, right?

Kendra Cooke:
That’s right.

Adam Small:
And you became a coach in 2005. Mm-Hmm. . And since then, you’ve aided 345 real estate agents and mortgage professionals in becoming millionaires during your time as coach. Is that correct?

Kendra Cooke:
That’s correct.

Adam Small:
That’s incredible. So, you know, in, in about what 17 years you’ve helped 345 people go from, whether it be above average income or whatever, to millionaires, bonafide millionaires, that, that’s an astounding number of people. I mean, so if that doesn’t highlight that you guys need to pay attention, I don’t think anything else will. So in addition to coaching, you’re also a wife, a mother, a marathoner, and a volunteer. What else do you want people to know about you?

Kendra Cooke:
I think the main thing is, is to leave a legacy. You’ve gotta have a career and then you gotta pay it forward. And so I was very fortunate to get into coaching from somebody that I was following their, their previous plan. And she took me to where I wanted to go. So I think the main thing for me is build a career and then turn it into a legacy where people wanna follow you to take their career to the next level.

Adam Small:
Great, great. So pay it forward as well. That’s right. Might create that legacy.

Kimberly Small:
So you mentioned marathons. A lot of people will say that success for a real estate agent or a business is it’s, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And I think a lot of people look at successful businesses and they think they happened overnight and or the people are surely are already wealthy or, or something along those lines. So how do you help your clients kind of get into that mindset that it’s a long game that requires good habits and consistent habits in order to get to where they wanna be?

Kendra Cooke:
That’s a great question. I think the main thing, just like training, you build upon the basics. And I think a lot of times when the market is tough or it’s changing, we think that there’s something new or there’s something shiny that we should chase. And honestly, just like real estate, most businesses, we just stick to the basics better than anybody. So I think that having a plan that you follow consistently every single day, whether it’s prospecting call, so whether it’s client parties once a quarter, whether it’s mailers, whatever you do in your business, you have to do it consistently. And I think what happens is we get busy and we drop off from doing things and then we go backwards and then we gotta ramp back up to start over. And I think consistency is the big key. Same thing with training for a marathon. You gotta train consistently.

Kimberly Small:
Yeah. I just it’s funny, I saw that a woman recently broke the record for marathons running 106 marathons, 106 days. Yes. The world record. I’m sure you saw crazy in Interesting. I can’t even imagine.

Kendra Cooke:
That’s not me, .

Kimberly Small:
I do think so. How many marathons have you done? Just curious.

Kendra Cooke:
I, well I’ve done about 150 races, but six full marathons. Okay. you know, a a half iron man, a lot of five Ks, a lot of 10 Ks, a lot of half marathons. So my running days are slowing down.

Kimberly Small:
, I’ve done two full marathons. I’m, I’m ba five Ks are more my speed. So I, I get that

Adam Small:
, I just did my first half marathon in May here in Indianapolis.

Kendra Cooke
Good for you.

Adam Small:
So, I was pretty happy with it. It wasn’t, you know, the fastest time in the world, but I’m okay with that. I finished.

Kendra Cooke:
So there’re such a small group of people in the United States or just in the world that will ever finish a half marathon or a full marathon. So we’re all accomplished runners.

Adam Small:
There we go. Right. Before we move on to, to my next question, I, I actually wanted to talk a little bit, you talk about, you know, consistency, preventing the, and I forget the way you phrased it, but I’ve always kind of heard it called the fester famine cycle. Mm-Hmm. , right? Right. So you get busy and you stop doing the things you should be doing and then your business drops off. So then you, you know, you get back into doing your marketing and your the things and you get a real good amount of income coming in and then you stop doing those things. So you know, what you said is that a lot of what you do is teach people the basics and then keep doing the basics. You help keep them going. And during your presentation, earlier you talked about accountability. How is it that the coach role helps keep somebody accountable?

Kendra Cooke:
So there’s a couple things that I would tell you about that we live and die by a time block schedule. And so I know now because we all have a cell phone, we think, oh, we’ll just put our calendar on our phone and we’ll pay attention to it. And the truth of the matter is we won’t, something will beep and say, Hey, you’re supposed to moving on to something else and we just swipe right or swipe left. We don’t pay attention to the phone. Right. We can make that thing stop. Mm-Hmm. . So we teach a lot of our students to print your calendar. And so most of us, our sense of accomplishment that we follow a checklist. And so we need to see that hey, I did my best, My best is good enough. So we check off every box on their calendar as they complete the box.

So if you have an hour of prospecting, once that hour’s done, you check that box, you go on to the next one. So one of the ways we can hold ’em accountable is have ’em send us their time block schedule with the check boxes that they really stuck to that block and it’ll start out maybe 40% of the time. And then next week we’ll make a better deal and to go to 50 or 60. And eventually we say, if you can master your time block schedule 80% of the time is a real estate agent, then you’ve kind of mastered it because there’s so many other factors that control.

Adam Small:
Well, life interferes

Kendra Cooke:
Right? Us. Yes. Well, and you’ve gotta stop and think, I mean, a appraiser has to go at a certain time where we have a fire we have to put out. So there’s a lot of exceptions to that. But if you can stick to your schedule 80% of the time, that is a true sense of accomplishment. The other thing is, is we have homework. So whether it’s your efforts and your results through a greatness tracker or tracking your leads, if you tell me you want 20 leads and you send me a lead tracker that has five, then obviously you aren’t doing the work to generate 20. So the accountability comes from tracking everything in your business and providing those tracking methods to your coach so we can hold you accountable to make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

Adam Small:
On the flip side of that, from a gamification perspective, the physical act of checking the box off provides that sense of accomplishment. Sure. Right. Which people then feed off of, because the more you accomplish, the better you feel about what you’re doing. You’re seeing, you know, you’re accomplishing something so you’re moving forward. Right?

Kendra Cooke:
Absolutely. And most of us are visual learners, right? Yes. Some people learn through different aspects, but most high level salespeople we’re visual. Mm-Hmm. . So that’s why we like to read the books and touch it. Most of us don’t read it from a Kindle and that’s why we don’t put our calendar on the, on our phone. We want it printed because we learn from visual learning. So

Adam Small:
As I sit here with my iPad and my pencil for no taking, right. .

Okay. So I kind of jumped ahead a little bit there, but I, I actually wanted to ask you, you know, when in your real estate career did you, you know, start working with a coach yourself and you know, why did you do that?

Kendra Cooke:
It’s a great question. So actually I started coaching in 2005 with the choir. I went to my first event, which is where I met one of the CCM folks that sponsored this today. And I went there out of desperation, quite honestly. I was working about 80 hours a week and I was the burn and churn. I would have the great month and then the terrible month and the great month and the terrible month. And I got in some really horrible habits of working, thinking I could work harder instead of working smarter. And I couldn’t get it all done. I was not truthful and honest with my husband as to where we were financially. But more importantly I was addicted to work, if you would. And so I would go in my office at night and say, Oh, I’m just gonna fax. I know people listen to this are gonna be like, what’s a fax machine?

But when I was in the business a long, long time ago we started with a fax machine. So I would go and I’m just gonna fax a contractor or I’m just gonna return an email and three or four hours later I come out and everybody in my family’s in bed, you know, and he said, Listen, this isn’t gonna work. We gotta figure it out. So he asked me to move the computer outta my office and I did. And then I started sneaking outta bed at night to go to my office to get on the computer and I got busted for that too. So long story short, I think I found a coach outta desperation. I knew there had to be a better way, I just didn’t know what it was. And I am always open to feedback and I wouldn’t say criticisms, but somebody who’s done it better than me, I will go and be a sponge. So I’m not too prideful. I’m very humble to say, Hey, you teach me your way, I’m willing to change. And I think that in our market today, there’s a lot of change happening and people are feeling the pain of change cuz most of us don’t love change, let’s be honest. But that will create the growth that we all need to go to the next level and to sustain the market that we’re in, whatever market the listeners are in.

Adam Small:
Right. Right. So it is funny you talk about working smarter, not harder. I was in the Marine Corps 20 years ago and from day one, I mean step off the bus into bootcamp and you start hearing about work smarter, not harder. If you wanna work harder, you’re gonna get strong, you know, otherwise and, and meaning that they’re gonna make you do pushups and that sort of thing. Sure. Cuz you’re not working smarter, you’re working harder. Right. So it’s kind of something that resonates with me personally. So. Well

Kendra Cooke:
Thank you for your service. My daughter is a Marine as well. She’s in Cherrypoint, North Carolina. Oh, in the Marine right now.

Adam Small:
Not far from losing and all that. Yep. Mm-hmm. .

Kendra Cooke:
Absolutely. Yeah. So thank you for your Service.

Adam Small:
Thank you. What advice were you given early in your career that you feel helped you out the most

Kendra Cooke:
Be in the relationship based business. I think there are so many ways to spend money in real estate, whether it’s buying leads or cold calling or whatever those things are. And I laugh and say I’m the worst cold calling ever because I don’t want somebody to hang up on me, I’ll cry. I want everybody to like me. So I knew early on that I’m gonna have to find people who like me so I can do business with ’em. So my career actually started when I was 18. I moved to Nashville to go to law school and went to a temp agency to find a job until school started. And I was placed in a real estate office and everybody there that was MLS books. I mean, some of the people listen to this is like, what’s a book? But you know, all the houses used to be in a big o thick book and we got ’em every Friday and half the houses were already sold when we got, there were no lock boxes. You drove to pick up a key at somebody’s office to go show their listing and take the key back. And I learned really early on that everybody in the office that did well had great relationships. People were always bringing them flowers and gifts and they were always going to these elaborate parties and they weren’t sitting in open houses on Sundays and they weren’t knocking doors and they weren’t getting rejection from cold calling somebody. So I knew really early on that I wanna be in the relationship based business. It just happened to be real estate.

Adam Small:
So that’s a, a big shift in career from law school to real estate agents. So apparently it worked out well for you then.

Kendra Cooke:
Yeah, I did one whole semester in law school. That was it. I figured out really early that I, that was not for me. I

Kimberly Small:
I Took a gap year after my undergrad and was planning law school and I spent time as a paralegal and that was, that was enough for me to to move in a different direction. There you go. So you talk about wanting to pay it forward and you, you’re open about talking about how many mistakes you’ve made in your own career. What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen agents make?

Kendra Cooke:
Well, let’s see. First and foremost, chasing business versus attracting it. I made those mistakes early on and I said earlier, I didn’t buy leads, but I spent a lot of money to try to attract leads. And really what I was doing was chasing man. So I did the billboards, I did the moving trucks, I did the shopping carts, I did every gadget that came down the pike thinking that that’s where my leads were gonna come from and spend a ton of money. So I would tell you relationships work and they cost a heck of a lot less money. So learning to attract people, bringing value to them, being a master negotiator, being a connector in the community will bring you way more business than spending a ton of money. So that’s number one. Number two, most of us fail at hiring real estate agents.

We’re salespeople. We’re not really managers, if you will. And I see a lot of people hire family members that, and it turns out not so well. And so that’s very uncomfortable. And the other thing is, is we are not real good at being leaders and no disrespect, but it’s that we want everybody to like us. That’s why we’re real estate agents, right? I said that earlier. And so we won’t hold people accountable. And so when you hire a team, the things we have to remember about team members is they will not take the risk that we’re willing to take as a Realtor®, right? We’re commission only. And so when people join our team, they wanna steady paycheck, they want somebody to lead them, they wanna be part of something big, but they’re not the visionary. That’s what we are. And we want people to like us and we don’t wanna hold anybody accountable and we don’t wanna hurt anybody’s feelings.

So it’s not a really good situation when you hire the wrong person or you hire somebody and you don’t lead them or you don’t hold them accountable. So I think that hiring is a big issue, not having the right leg gens out there and really chasing the business, spending a ton of money versus attracting it. And then the time management. I love when people say I work 80 hours a week and then I get their schedule and they’re like, I’m getting my hair cut and I’m, you know, at PTO for two hours. I’m like, you’re not really working 80 hours a week. You may not be in your house 80 hours a week, but you’re truly not working. So I think having a plan to where we lead, generate every single day consistently where your leads are coming in and you get to the point where you can cherry pick the deals that you want and build a team to help you take care of the rest of them. I mean, that’s the ultimate goal, but those are probably the bulk of the mistakes that most of us make.

Kimberly Small:
Any, any tips on you? You talk about hiring on when an agent could, should consider hiring somebody and any tips on kind of overcoming that challenge of finding the right person and holding them accountable?

Kendra Cooke:
Great question. So we teach a structure at the core of how to hire and when to hire and who to hire. So as a real estate agent, we find that you can do about three to four deals by yourself before you make your first hire. And when we say three to four deals, they’re like, Oh, I can do way more than that. Well what we don’t consider is that’s three buyers, three sellers, three inspectors, three title companies, three lenders, three repair people. So when you look at it, it’s about three times 10 or 11 people. So it’s really, you’re managing 30 people throughout a transaction. So there’s so many moving pieces in parts. So we find three to four is about cap limit for you to manage before you make your first hire. Now another big mistake is we normally hire a salesperson on our team first and we give up part of our leads and we give up part of our income.

And we really teach that in a different mindset that we hire the admin person first. Because if the admin person can take the 10, 15, $20 hour work off of my plate and I go generate one more lead, then I pay for that person. And it doesn’t cost me anything. My income hasn’t changed personally. So we like administrative people to help manage our calendar, to get our mailers out to work on our database plan, our client party, stuff like that. So really not so much in the transaction. We can still do our TC part of the transaction with one admin, but it frees us up to prospect a little bit more and to pay for that person. Once we’re generating enough leads to bring on a showing assistant, then that’s usually our third hire. We’ll be number one as the leader, the admin, and then the showing assistant.

So, and you did ask me where to find, find those people and how to interview for them. I think the biggest gift I could give everybody listening is just test people before you hire them. Make sure that you’re hiring the person that’s equipped for the job you want them to do. And a lot of times we hire the wrong person. I’ve done it many times, I wanna be the next kinder cook. I’m like, you’re hired, right? You’re gonna make me a lot of money. Well we don’t need two kinder cooks on this team. Right? So I think getting a disc test and making sure that your first hire is the opposite of you. I need the details, I need the compliant, I need the study person that’s gonna keep me on track. Cuz we’re squirrel people, right? As salespeople. So that would be what I would look at when I was hiring my making my first hire. I can’t have too many cooks in the kitchen. No, no pun no, no. That’s right. Absolutely.

Adam Small:
Something you mentioned earlier, kind of sticking with me here. You talked about during your presentation and also as we were talking earlier about the shiny object, chasing the shiny object, right? Mm-Hmm. and we’ve always kind of called that the silver bullet marketing, right? Right. Meaning that, you know, whatever the the new thing that’s come along this is gonna fix my whole business and all you have to do is that one thing, right? Mm-Hmm. . So how, how do you get an agent to kind of overcome that mindset?

Kendra Cooke:
Well track the return on your investment , right? So if you’re gonna buy leads and track every lead that comes in, and more importantly track the conversion, I think realtors get caught up in, oh my gosh, this situation created a hundred leads. And then I said, Well, how many of ’em close? Well, none yet. I’m like, well how long are you gonna chase ’em to get your money back? Right? Right, right. So I think the, the big point of the shiny object is, is there a rate of return on investment and how fast do I get it and how far do I go on the hold before I get return on it? And we are not good detail oriented people, for the most part is sales people, right? Mm-Hmm. . And so we don’t track that. So most of the people that come into our program are hiring us for several reasons, either to really straighten out their team, to help them generate more leads or to look at their profitability.

We do teach a lot of finance around profit and loss in their business. And then taking those profits into their personal life on a personal budget and then investing that money. The ultimate goal is for us to help them accumulate wealth. So a lot of times when I get ’em and I’m like, Oh my gosh, you’re spending X dollars on this shiny object if you will, what’s the return on that? I have no idea. So we’ll track that for 30 or 60 or 90 days and show them that you’re spending this money and nothing’s coming back. We talked about farming, we talked about database. I can show you the return on every mailer from my database when 85 90% of my leads come outta my database, it’s worth me to spend the money.

Adam Small:
So, so it all comes down to showing, showing the money, right? Show me where the money, right? Yeah,

Kendra Cooke:
Exactly. Give me a return on my investment or I’m not gonna do it.

Adam Small:
Exactly. And that’s, that, that makes a lot of sense. You know, it’s funny cuz we, we haven’t done this for about 14, 15 years now. We’ve run into a, a number of agents that the latest and greatest technology is, you know, the silver bullet and and the shiny object. And we have at times had issues with kind of overcoming that mindset and, and so I was just curious what your perspective on that was. Now you also talked about time management and how you work with agents on that. You talked about the blocking and all that. You know, recently here during the last couple of years, houses have gone really fast where, you know, if an agent wasn’t on it right away, it was already pending by the time they got their customer out there. What kind of advice or tips would you give an agent for balancing their schedule during times like that?

Kendra Cooke:
So a couple things. I think that we don’t do a good job of setting proper expectations on the front end. So when you do your buyer consultation or you do your listing presentation, really asking the hard questions like what are your must haves in this house and what are your nice to haves? And you know, it got to the point that people were desperate. They’re like, just show me anything that’s in my price range. And I would go back to, hey, your must haves were had to have a fireplace. This house doesn’t have a fireplace. Are you willing to purchase a house that doesn’t have a fireplace? Probably not. Then why are we running over there showing it?

Adam Small:
Why am I looking at it all?

Kendra Cooke:
Yes. And so I say a lot of times we create more drama and chaos for the client as the realtor cuz we get excited and we’re fearful about where’s the next deal gonna come from because we’re not prospecting consistently. So we don’t know where our next lead’s gonna come from. We don’t know where our next deal’s gonna come from. So we’re running and jumping and fetching at every single opportunity. And that goes back to the scarcity mindset that I talked about earlier. When you don’t have a plan and you’re not working the plan to generate the leads, then you’ve gotta jump at every opportunity cuz there might not be another opportunity for a while. So I think that as far as time management and how to really help people get out of that jump and go or wasting time or driving themselves crazy is set better expectations. Ask better questions up front. But then secondly, there are gonna be times like that. So our rule on my calendar is you can move things, you cannot remove them. So if I have prospecting block in the morning and showing houses in the afternoon and they need to be flip flop, that’s fine. You can move them. But at some point in time today, I have to prospect or we don’t eat, it’s

Adam Small:
Gotta get

Kendra Cooke:
Done, it’s gotta get done. So I think moving things around are okay in those markets, but what happens is we remove them and then the hi, the prospecting doesn’t happen and then our business goes flying down the cliff and then we gotta work to get it back in on track. And that’s that inconsistency we talked about.

Adam Small:
Exactly. So, so it all comes back to being consistent no matter what it is within in this market, probably any business, it’s about consistently making sure you’re out there trying to generate that next part of your business That’s right. That next lead, that next income source for your business. Right? Right. So if an agent is thinking about working with a business coach, where should they start? You know, what, what questions should they ask of a new coach or a prospective coach and what should they be able to answer about themselves in order to make sure that they’re aligning properly with, with a coach that’s gonna work for them?

Kendra Cooke:
I think that’s a great question. I think first and foremost, they need to assess the situation. Why do they wanna coach? What are they looking for? Are they looking for someone who’s active in the industry, who has, has done what they want to do? That was very important to me. I didn’t wanna follow somebody who had done it 20 years ago. I wanted to follow somebody who was doing it right now. Like this market is hard and it’s only gonna get a little harder before it gets better. Doesn’t mean there’s not a ton of opportunities. But if you weren’t in a market and you haven’t worked a down market like this, how are you gonna tell me how to work it? Right? Right. So I always wanted somebody active in the industry. So they need to figure out who do they wanna follow? Is it somebody who’s doing it alongside them or somebody who did it 20 years ago?

Are they looking for motivation or are they looking for accountability? Right? Mm-hmm. for me, I don’t need to be motivated. I’m a self-motivated person. I’m at between four and 5:00 AM every single day. Doesn’t matter if I’m on vacation or not, that’s just, I’m just in a routine. I do the same thing every morning. I eat the same thing for breakfast. I’m very routine, right? And so I don’t need a motivator, I need an accountability person, right? I need somebody to say, you said you were gonna get 20 leads this month and you got 12. Like what are you gonna do different? Let’s practice your script. Let’s open some doors. Here’s a homework assignment. You go figure it out and you bring me 20 leads or else, right? I want some consequences around it. Most people don’t. So they gotta really make sure that they want a tough coach with accountability or they need to be motivated.

And then what is the purpose of it? For me, I needed to figure out how to manage my schedule better before I lost my family. I needed to realize that I had to stop spending so much money trying to chase business and learn how to attract it. Because working your database is fairly inexpensive compared to what I was doing. And then more importantly, how do I build wealth to be able to retire and have my dream job? I knew at some point in time I wanted to be a full-time coach and I wanted to live in Florida. I couldn’t do that in real estate cuz my real estate business was in Tennessee. So I wanted to get really savvy with my money, somebody that had money that could teach me how to do it so I could accumulate wealth and someday retire and do my dream job.

So I think I would ask them, why do you wanna coach? What are you looking for? Where, what are your struggles that you want somebody to help you with? And then what are you willing to pay? Like we by far, are the most expensive real estate coaching company in, in the United States that I’m aware of. It is very expensive for all three levels for me. I believe it is by far the most expensive. But I also know that I can give you every stat you want. You know, our program is a two year commitment. Our average student stays five and a half years. They know the program in two.

Adam Small:
So they’re finding value in it without a doubt. Right.

Kendra Cooke:
And they’re paying for the accountability. They don’t wanna lose the accountability. Right? Right. So I think that that’s what I would say to you. What are you looking for in a coach? What do you want them to help you with and what are you willing to pay for it?

Adam Small:
Okay. So this might be a bad question to ask, but do you still see a coach or work with a coach?

Kendra Cooke:
Absolutely. Okay. So I have a spiritual coach. Mm-Hmm. , I have a financial coach, I have a money coach, I have a personal trainer. I ride a Peloton with a group of people that hold me accountable. I have an accountability group called Workout Warriors that I lead. And so we hold each other accountable. So I have accountability with my money, with my spirituality, my marriage, my body, my business. Yes. So I pay coaches for ev