Transcription
Every deal we had exploded. Everyone wants to know how to do TikTok to make a million dollars, right? I have more folders in my inbox than anyone Microsoft and Apple have ever seen. I only know that because they've told us. I work for the deal; that is my boss. The deal is the boss. So if you're not following up for the deal, if you're not working for that deal, if you're not pushing that deal forward at all times, then you're actually not doing your job. When you don't have help that you can go to 24/7, what do you do? You can figure it out. Are you dying? You're not. D-I didn't die, okay? We're probably not going to die. No, not yeah, some other people will die. But if you're not going to die, you should go buy something.
Ryan, thanks for having us in your office. Beautiful office! Welcome to the conference room. Is it 15,000 square feet here? The office? Yeah, across the four floors. Yeah, it's a huge office, very impressive. I want to start with something because some agents, everybody knows who you are, right? But some agents are probably in one camp; they know you're an operator, they know you're down to the business, you're brilliant, and then there's a bunch of other agents that think it was all because of the TV show. So what's your reaction when you hear that?
It's funny; it used to be that I would get stopped on the street because of Million Dollar Listing, you know? And then there was a switch, like a little right before COVID, where that went away, and they were stopping me on the street because of YouTube, you know, as kids. Because we make property tours and make them fun and exciting, then we would target kids because then the kids have influence over the parents. People always assume like, "Ah, Ryan just does his dances and does these things on social; it's not real." Well, the whole reason I did it the whole time was so that I could influence the kids who have influence over the parents and the business managers and the bankers and the attorneys to make the decisions, and it works that way.
I will say Million Dollar Listing, the TV show, was a huge help, obviously, across social and helped me get to a place where I could write books and all that. It was very much a great foundation to build upon, but there have been a lot of people who've been on reality TV who haven't built much else other than that. I would say it's helped me open doors, but it's also closed a lot of others, right? Because of the prejudice, like you say, where like, "Ah, just the reality TV guy." And so I've had to work incredibly hard, you know, and just use the luck that I got from that one day in 2012 to just make it exponentially greater.
I can imagine it even hurt you with some business that you were trying to procure. People were just skeptical of getting involved with the guy that was on Bravo. I'm sure it hurts us now, you know? But the way I always thought about it was, I'm never going to know otherwise, and it'll just be a wash for the business that I don't get because people will say, "Oh, he's just on a reality TV show." Then I'll take all the business I do get. The biggest clients I've ever had, the multi-billionaires that we work with, I've all been in contact with them in some way, shape, or form via the show, either because their daughter introduced me to the assistant who introduced me to this, or the wife connected to me the first, whatever it might be.
So would I have met that many people the way I have over the last 12 years organically, just as like the quiet real estate agent in the corner without anything special about him? I don't think so. So there will always be people who don't like me, always be people that make fun of me, and I think success is just the best path forward.
It's true. We've never met, but I know of you. You're famous in our world. I don't know about that, but I've seen enough of your content and enough of the stories that you've told to know how deep in the operations of the business you are. With going back to your agent days, you know you're still an agent, but going back to when you were really building your agent business, your email strategy I think is something that is overlooked. It's probably the most impressive because you don't talk about a CRM like most agents. Like, "What's the best CRM I should use?" You just have the will to follow up more than anybody else, and it's through email. You're like the Mark Cuban of emailing for the real estate industry. If you listen to Mark Cuban talk about how he's emailing six to eight hours a day, you've told stories about how you follow up through email. What's your email system that agents can learn from?
What an in-depth topical conversation! Nobody wants to hear, but this is what agents should hear: how you're using email to your advantage to have the will to follow up more than anybody. It's what I find really, really interesting because it's really tactical. Everyone wants to know how to do TikTok to make a million dollars; no one wants to know how to have an email strategy set up to go and meet your next future client because one takes a little bit more work and isn't nearly as sexy.
It's funny you bring that up too because email is also a part of how I think about time management and my thousand-minute rule and how I've always structured my day. When Harvard Business School last year reached out to me, I thought they were reaching out because they were going to write a case study on real estate or the brand or selling, whatever it might be. They were like, "No, we really care about your time management." I was like, "What?" They even said they interviewed me forever, and they even said, "Yeah, your emails processed." I was like, "Are you kidding me?" Yeah, you could write a case study on this through all this; it comes back to emails.
So I have more folders in my inbox than anyone Microsoft and Apple have ever seen. I only know that because they've told us. When the systems crash, they have to fix them, and they're like, "Updating their systems for this real estate broker in New York City who needs his folders." I definitely leverage time out of it. So I have different processes, and I have an email assistant who helps me sort, right, to manage. I have a no-reply inbox folder that catches every single email that I send that someone doesn't respond to every 48 hours. That way, there's like, you imagine, just go through your text, just do one deep scroll through your text, you're going to find something you forgot to reply to. Text is infuriating, exactly!
So same thing on email; you get buried in it all day long. You're separating from the spam and the trash and everything. So I have active buyer folders, you know, listing pitches, new pitches. Now that we’re on the company, it's resale pitches for them, it's agent pitches, it's broken down by market. It's all completely organized so that at any given point in time, I don't even have to search because once you've been doing this for 15 years, you have a million emails. There's a lot of data, and it'll break. I can't search email on my phone, and the phone freezes. So we have a process of being able to go through it to find absolutely anything so that we can also remember to follow up and follow up and follow up.
Then our follow-up process is follow up, follow through, follow back forever—the three Fs—till they buy or die. Why is your will on the follow-up so strong? People will watch; there's a lot of agents who be like, "I've heard agents say this to me. I want to figure out how I can get to be like Ryan Serhant, how I can get into that position." I always say to them, "Do you understand how much follow-up he does?" But you're talking; these agents are always talking about the social, they're always talking about the Instagram, which is all stuff you want in your business. But his will to follow up is better than 99.99% of salespeople, not just agents. Where do you get that will to keep following up until, like you said, they die?
I think because once you give me a little nibble, then I know you're real and you exist. We spend a lot of time doing cold outreach, emailing people cold. I don't follow up with those people for five years who never respond ever, and some people we do, you know, where it makes a lot of sense. But once I see that someone's real, maybe just now isn't the right time. I've always just followed up with value. It's never, "Are you alive? Are you still searching? Anything I can do to help you?" It's never the annoying retail salesperson. It's like, "Hey, thanks for coming. What can I help you?" It's like, "Dude, I don't know. This is why I buy things online." It's always, always, always with value. It's always a new listing, a new comp, something new in the market, and it's never expecting a response ever.
Like, that's also the thing; I'm always putting these out. The follow-up emails are like newsletters in a way. I don't format them that way, but it's like I've sent out a newsletter. I don't really expect people to reply to it. If they do, which they do, then great. But otherwise, this is me helping you, helping you, give, give, give, give, give. Until someone writes back, "Hey, stop it. Hey, I bought something. Sorry, I used someone else. Oh, hey, I got my own real estate. I moved to Hawaii," whatever it might be, then they're fair game.
I think I wrote in my first book, you know, most of those deal stories in that book that were all incredibly painful were really around the process of follow-up, right? And really just following up with people over and over and over and changing strategy and pivoting strategy and staying on top of them and working for the deal. The other thing I will say, especially to young agents, and it's hard for them to understand, is to understand who you work for. You're an entrepreneur; you're a salesperson. Who do you work for?
99.9% of the people in this business say, "Well, I work for myself." Okay, okay, so then I say, "Okay, but other than yourself, who do you work for?" "Oh, my cent." Okay, well, that's still wrong, right? I don't work for a buyer; I don't work for a seller. I'm responsible to me in the future, right? I work for the deal. That is my boss. The deal is the boss. So if you're not following up for the deal, if you're not working for that deal, if you're not pushing that deal forward at all times, then you're actually not doing your job.
I see it even now; I get copied on emails, and I get shown text screenshots. I don't know why they didn't take the deal, and I'm like, "Because you're not working for the deal in that message. You're working for them," or, "I don't know, you're being a receptionist. You're being a tour guide. You're showing off the museum. You're not actually working for the deal and following up until they see the same value you do." Then they're going to buy with you, or they're going to buy elsewhere, or sell with you, or sell elsewhere.
Then you've got to find that happy medium between following up with value and then being annoying. So, like, I don't, it's not like I meet someone and I follow up with them all day, every day. You know, somebody I might follow up with every two weeks, every three weeks. We have a different system; we have a follow-up calendar we use. As you sell more and you can start affording more, all I ever cared about when I first started selling and building my team was, like, I mean, I lived in a studio apartment for the longest time ever, and in New York, you don't have to have a car. So I kept my overhead and expenses really, really low. I just wanted to have the most support staff.
Yeah, it's like I want to make sure that I'm only doing what I can do best, which is I got to go meet people so that I can follow up with them so that I can show them things. Like, no system, no AI is going to do a deal. So your follow-up, is any of it that's automated, or you're finding, well, you know the market, but you're seeing this comp, and I know who to send that to, these three or four people, the new listing, and you're writing every email personally?
No, not now. I used to for like 10 years I did. Now I have, you know, two email assistants who help with that, and they're not automating it. They're not automating it. A big takeaway for the agents listening because they're always looking for the automated email is spam. Like, there's just, they're looking for the automated system. Dude, everyone wants the OIC for everything. So in 2024, I just want to double down on this. Yeah, 2024, Ryan Serhant and his email assistants are not automating the follow-up. You're curating it for the individual to add extreme value.
100%. A lot of other things we're automating now, like we have a, when does this come out? I think we're doing it next week. Next week? So like before the book, which everybody should go and buy, "Brand It Like Serhant," February 6, my third and final book before the book, the final of the selling trilogy of my three. But it is also so much; it's so hard, man. It's so much work to write a good book. I never want to do it half-ass, and I'm not like the reality TV book guy. So like it's tactical, and we can go into it if you want to, but we're going to go into the book, and this is the one you want out of the three for sure. Then you're going to want to go get the other two, but yeah, we'll go back to the book.
Yeah, yeah, and was I saying? So it's, oh, who? So we automate everything else now. So we have an app that we built here called Simple that just takes care of all real estate agent administrative tasks you could ever do. Like, you want to run comps? You don't have to anymore. You want to add people to your CRM, and you're running down the street? You don't have time for it? You don't have to anymore. You want to do marketing? You want to do a social content calendar? You want to literally anything you can think of, other than meeting clients and doing anything that is personal to you, it does.
Then it learns how you operate. If you're somebody that likes to price things high, it learns that and gives you a higher than average CMA. If you're somebody that likes to do all of your email at night, it can draft all the emails for you, set it up in your inbox so you can just bang it all out at night and save yourself an hour of time. I'm very into time hacking, which is probably why Harvard wrote that case study, to buy back as much of my time during the day as I possibly can so that I can use that time in a way that I am uniquely qualified to use. For me, that's being in front of people, doing stuff like this, right?
And doing like unique follow-up that is personal, that doesn't feel like it's spam or automated because we all get spam automated follow-up all day long. It's just, it's just all bull, and it's all trash. So like, why even do it? We were in the lobby of a hotel, I think Grand, so Grand. One of your agents, she just sold a $31 million deal, I think it closed. I think I can say that. Yeah, good for her, right? That's going to take, you know, on those $30, $40, $50 million deals, your personal follow-up.
Oh yeah, or that agent that's a great agent. Yeah, it's a lot of, listen, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of emails. Yeah, you know, because unfortunately in our line of work, right, where we're dealing with outside clients who have lots of different types of jobs and lives, like they're not all on Slack, you know, and you can move them into different applications where we can search for properties together, and you can communicate that way. But then you're going back to text or going back to email to legitimize the conversation, or you're picking up the phone.
As long as you understand the different means of communication that you have and you're organized like that, man, not being organized is probably, in my mind, probably the number one reason most salespeople don't make it. It's not just the money. People say, "Oh, it's because it's too hard. I don't make enough money. I can't afford to do this. I go back and get a 9 to 5." I think that's an aftereffect of not being disciplined and not being organized. And don't take organized as spend all day organized. What you're talking about right here is getting organized to do the things that, like you said, are unique to you, that only Ryan can do—get in front of customers, do those bigger deals.
The app Simple you mentioned, CRM, so is there a Serhant brokerage CRM that everybody? I called it SRM. Obviously, we white-labeled a couple of different pieces of another couple of software, and we stuck them together because I just like, our value add as a company is not, "Hey, I'm going to go spend $500 million building out a CRM." Like, why would I do that? But the same way I wouldn't reinvent texting. Dan from Follow Up Boss said, "Just tell when you see Ryan and money, just tell them to call me. We're looking for him over at FUB."
So yeah, yeah, yeah, didn't they just sell to somebody? They just sold to Zillow for $500 million. Yeah, exactly. So he should go buy something. He should go buy something, get out of real estate. I'm sure he's going to buy a lot of things. Talking about Serhant brokerage, you started during the pandemic, which was borderline insane, but you pulled it off.
Here it was borderline insane everywhere else. It seemed like it was totally fine. Yeah, if you did it in, you know, South Florida or something, totally fly. There was no COVID, but it was a big leap to do it that time in this city. All things considered, dude, these windows were boarded up at that time, man. There was SWAT on the street corner, people running around. Shable people were, you know, at that time, you know, COVID started. It was like what? Weird Tiger King, and then it became very dark and crazy, you know, for an entire summer.
There was, you know, a big battle internally in these urban areas, and, you know, and then people were just in a really, really tough position. So it was hard. I couldn't try to go find office space; it was nuts. So I borrowed a friend's townhouse in Tribeca, like 155 Dwayne. We started there; that was our first spot. We just hung out around a dining room table, and I was like, "I just need it for a couple weeks during this COVID thing." And then a year later, we finally moved out.
Believe you believe the two-week story? It was going to be over; we were all flattening the curve, man. That's all we were doing was flattening that curve. And then I think like the minute we realized, "Are you dying? You're not D-I didn't die." I okay, we're probably not going to die. I went down to Florida. Yeah, some other people will die. But if you're not going to die, you should go buy something because prices are like in New York City fall of 2020, right when we started the company.
I was so nervous about overhead and expenses and everything. Certain high-net-worth individuals came out of the woodwork. They were like, "Are things on sale right now?" It's like, "Yeah, man, you can go up to 57th Street on Billionaire's Row, go get something for half off." Because there are people in the city who believe that the world has now come to an end and Armageddon is upon us. They were like, "Yeah, I don't think that's true." We sold a penthouse, right? If you go around the corner, the Renzo Piano Towers, right over here, there's two towers. Travis Kalanick paid, I think, $40 million for his on the North Tower. I sold the South Tower that was asking $45 million for $22 million in December during those times, during December of 2020, because the developer was like, "There's no vaccine; the world, New York City is dead."
The New York Times was like, "You are going to die," and people took advantage. Then 2021 happened, and the rest is 50% discounts. Everybody should have listened to Jerry Seinfeld. He did that big piece; I remember that. Yeah, the Natalies took it, printed it, got his permission, printed it the size of an entire building outside the Benson, which is one of their condo projects in the Bris side, and it crushed it because people, he said, "New York is not going away." And if you, it didn't, man, there's more now than ever before.
So now fast forward, I think I was talking to Paul, your sales director, fascinating individual. He is very filled with knowledge, I will say. I'm looking, Paul, I'm going to email you, looking forward to maybe getting Paul on a pod because he was really fascinating. It was amazing to me that he's managing 300-plus agents. I said, "Well, you got to have managers reporting up?" "Nope." "You got to have pod leaders?" "Nope." Okay, stop making me look bad. Okay, I like efficiencies here, so that's efficient on the P&L.
I met your CFO too; she's brilliant. She kind of likes that. The first thing, like I made the decision that I was going to lead the last company that I was at. Well, first, I started interviewing other firms from 2017 to 2019, and I just could not find a place that made the most sense for me. I didn't want to go to a place that was just going to hang my license. In our markets and luxury markets, like that doesn't do anything for me. I wanted to be at a place that had good brand recognition that would actually help me.
If I'm going to move, I can't be a lateral move, and I don't want to go downhill. Every firm I talked to for two years had the same exact pitch, which was to summarize, "If you come to us, we're going to make you better." That's all they said over and over, and I was like, "I think I'm pretty good." It's like when Vince went on that tour in Entourage. You ever watch Entourage? He goes on that tour, and every pitch is the same. They show Apple, Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Coca-Cola, two of the most recognizable names on the planet. Vincent Chase, we intend to make you as popular as both of them. Apple, Canon, Vincent Chase, Microsoft, McDonald's, Vincent Chase, brand name recognition. What do you think? I think I need to think, Vince. It's pathetic, Ari. It's what it was, man.
Then I finally, in 2019, was like, "I feel like there should be a firm out there that says, 'Hey, you agent, you know what? You're good. You want to improve? Great, we have an education arm, but we think you're great.'" I actually think that if you come to us, we're going to be better for you, and no one at all gave me that pitch whatsoever. So I was like, "F*** it, I guess I'll do my own thing." Then COVID hit, and I was like, "F***, what do I do?"
How much of the preparation up when COVID? We had started kind of towards the end of 2019, but we were so busy. COVID was a tragic event but a blessing in disguise because in March of 2020, New York City shut down. We were not essential workers; we couldn't show. The few of us who had decided, "Hey, we're going to go start our own company," we just got to sit there and build all day. You kind of get to get that time out away from—I couldn't do that today; I'd have no time.
What's in the hallway here? All those whiteboards of you planning the launch? Are we allowed to show that? Like just a scroll? Sure, yeah. We had a, we took, you know, one of our old offices was over here on Broadway. We took, I don't know if it was like, where are you based in LA too? No, I'm in Naples, Florida now, but I grew up in Connecticut, so I have a place in Connecticut. New York City has all these office buildings, and it was like on one day, Cuomo came out and said, "NYPD firefighters have to stay home because schools are closed."
This is when I went to Naples from Connecticut, correct? Right, catching on. So in March, everything went down; it was nuts. Our office building had like 400 offices in it. Doors were open, chairs were on their side, half-eaten granola bars were—it was like a movie. In one of those, we just went in and were like, "All right, let's just start the company from here. We'll just borrow this office for a bit." I don't even remember what the company was like; every office was empty. It was insane; it was crazy.
We had never started a company before ever. I was a soap opera actor who became a real estate agent to pay rent, and so my knowledge base was just, you know, YouTube, reading books, asking other people for advice. We got all that construction paper, and we put it up on all the walls in this office, and we're like, "Okay, so let's just do what we do when we launch buildings. We're going to build out a checklist." So we need an agency policy manual, like we need exclusive agreements, we need, you know, this. Okay, this is our legal one, this is our ops one, this is our marketing one. Okay, let's invent what the brand is.
We have that, we need a website. We just wrote them all down and just went checklist by checklist, and we kind of gave everybody their own divisions of labor so we could understand what everyone's scope of work was. There were six of us, you know, it was myself, it was Jenise, Yolanda, Mui, who've been with me from the beginning, Natalie, you know, who would eventually become our CFO, you know, helping consulting on finance. It was Kyle who ran education, you know, Adrian. There was a little more than six, so Adrian, Adrian Puma on the studio side and Kristen on the brand side.
So there were like, you can tell, maybe am I forgetting people's names? There were a couple, like my assistant quit, so then we had Scott Hill join us. But like in really the beginning part of us really building out this entire thing, there were like eight of us working, and I was still paying everyone's salaries even though nothing was closing, nothing was happening whatsoever. Nothing would close, dude. Everyone was in lawsuits; every deal we had exploded, and everyone tried to call force majeure clauses.
But what ended up happening in New York was, unfortunately, there was actually a worse event in New York that happened in 2001 with 9/11, and judges did not let people get out of contracts because of that. They weren't going to let anyone out of contracts because of COVID, right? Because they could all point to case law that just said, "Listen, in 2001, you had a precedent." We had, yeah, there was precedent, right? So there was case law there, and so it didn't, it wasn't a clause they could call. So people had to basically renegotiate. That's what we did for a long time, just renegotiated deals. They were in contract of $15 million, got them done at $12.5 million, you know, and thank God the deal got done, kind of stuff.
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The city's changed a lot since COVID, I feel like. Yeah, it's different. It's not a lot more weed, do you? Now it's okay to do it; it's legal now. How do you feel about that with kids? You know, you have kids.
Well, we went and got a house in Brooklyn, so that's a little different. We have a little more air. It's different. I mean, listen, Giuliani really cleaned up the city, and Bloomberg ran it like a Fortune 500 company for a long time. Fortunately, when I got into the business, Bloomberg was mayor, and that guy's a CEO, and he operated like a CEO. You can say whatever you want about that guy; a city is a company. You have to run it like a CEO, and you have to not care that some people are going to like you, some people are not going to like you.
You were here for the benefit of the company. Since then, we've had some really unique choices from mayor, and it's just hard. If you don't know how to run a company, you can't run New York City. It's impossible.
What do you think happens? You know, they cut budgets like, "Oh, we spend too much. Oh, do we need garbage men? Oh, there's other people you need garbage men." It's insane; it's insane. Anyway, yeah, you need to be a CEO.
I want to go back to the 300 agents plus. Yeah, one sales director still blows my mind. I want to tap into that as much as I possibly can. Can I mention something about that for one second? Because I very rarely get to do podcasts that are like this in-depth about this business. I talk a lot about motivation, inspiration, all that, but like, you know, I never had a sales manager for 12 years at the firm I was at. I was by myself completely.
So I never had anyone to go to. You're also an anomaly. I had my own team at that point and everything, but like I didn't have anyone to run anything through. You were a CEO at that time for your team, kind of. But you know what it does when you don't have stuff? When you don't have help that you can go to 24/7, what do you do? You figure it out.
So every problem, every issue, every little phone call, you know, the minute you realize, "Oh, I have someone there for me," dude, you call that person every 10 minutes because you can't make a decision on your own. You know, it's like people who, yeah, people who like are in long-term relationships forever, and they only watch comedies together. They only laugh because she's laughing, and they look to her for validation. Once you're by yourself, you're like, "H, I don't know, is that funny? I can't tell. Do I have feelings? Do I experience joy? I don't know. I don't like this show, dude."
Exactly. So for the first two years here of a sales manager, you know, agents, they came over like, "Hey, so to who do I go for this?" I'm like, "Go to yourself. Figure it out. I don't know. Figure it out." And no fear of the agent walking out because no one walked out because they also knew what the benefit was to being here. And guess what? Most of the time, 95% of the time, they would figure it out. Same thing now; I probably missed 10 phone calls from agents in the time that we've been sitting here.
So you, a lot of those direct goals, yeah, asking me questions about things, and I might let them sit, and by the time I call them all back, the response is going to say, "Oh yeah, no, no, I had to figure it out anyway." You know, it's like a baby deer. It's like, "Dude, you got to learn how to walk right now or you die."
So I get it that when you look at Paul and you say, "Wow, he has a lot on his plate," for sure, but it's also important to me that we're building an environment full of people who have like a can-do attitude, a get-up-and-go attitude. If you're—and we interview agents all the time from other firms, right? And there's firms I will not name, but these agents come over, and they don't know how to do things. They might be good lead generators, and they can show, but everything else they don't know how to do.
Listen, at certain firms, it's fine, I guess. I mean, it's a different world now. I think the individual solopreneur as an enterprise who really knows how to do like the nuts and bolts all the way to the skyscraper is going to be the most successful. It's like the best developers I work with ever started with a hammer, and then they became fund managers and knew how to raise money and all that, you know? Not like, not the guy that got into it because his dad was in it, and they just, you know, don't touch his shoes and all that. Like that person is always borderline bankruptcy.
That's scary. Yeah, you can do it all. So some of the—I want to go back just to the agents real quick because some of them obviously need a lot. Yeah, coming in, and you're grooming them to be on their own, kind of figure this thing out. A lot of agents across the country are used to a manager that's dealing with 50 agents, and then once they get to 50, they're like, "I need an assistant," meaning the manager or two assistants.
Yeah, and so New York City and the rest of the country is very different. And right now, we've got the lawsuits. I don't, as a broker, I don't know if you even want to comment on them. Commented on them. So we got all these copycat lawsuits happening, and look at New York City, and we just went through it all. How different it is than the rest of the country? It's going to be, it's much different than the landscape in Missouri. It is so different; that's for sure.
Yeah, the rules here are different. Like, we're not a part of NAR here, so I think New York City is probably the most insulated from anything that happens because of the uniqueness of this city. So take the city out of it, and you've expanded with Serhant, I think, into six different markets last year and maybe more. I might be underestimating. What's your take on the rest of the country with the lawsuits for agents in particular and brokers going forward?
My biggest concern about a class action lawsuit that attacks anyone's compensation is what kind of Pandora's Box has the judicial system just opened? How many people out there, forget real estate agents, how many people out there earn an income based on a commission? If you're going to come after realtors who are already pretty heavily regulated based on how their compensation is portrayed or which side cuts the check versus the other side, imagine that happening to every industry where you have commission salespeople.
So I think people have to start thinking a lot bigger than just real estate agents. But I think what this is going to do is we'll see what happens in Missouri. I know that they're trying to get it thrown out. There's going to be the appeal process, the appeal if they can afford it. You know, I think in a case like this, you can't just NAR, Keller, and Berkshire. I think you can't just delay damages like that, you know, in perpetuity. Like you'd have to post a bond, and that's expensive, you know?
And then imagine what happens as that rolls out across other states, you know? But anyway, I think that what it creates is I think some better clarity for the consumer to say, "Hey, let's be aware of what all the fees are." I think it puts agents in a position where they have to really, really show their value, which good agents do all day, every day. I think, you know, if you look at markets like Seattle, where they started removing buyers' fees as being mandatory and made buyers' agents represent to their client what they are and what the fees are, it didn't change the market. No one quit, you know? And if they did, they were probably going to quit anyway.
So I think it's just a very, very unique time to be in this business, and I, you know, for an hour when that happened, I was nervous. Like, "Oh man, would you?" You honestly for like an hour? Yeah, I was nervous. This is good for people here because I think a lot of people were in that same position. Yeah, I was nervous because I was, well, one, I just started my own brokerage company, and I just expanded to all these states, and I've got like all these agents here.
You know, you typically make 50% of your gross commission from the buy side, 50% on the sell side in terms of like your split depending on the marketplace. I'm like, "Great, so I just started this company. We just started expanding, and now there's a once-in-a-generation class action lawsuit against our business. Oh my God, what was me?" And then I started thinking, "Huh, there's definitely going to be opportunity here."
Because I started during COVID, and I felt the same way for an hour on like April 1st, 2020. I was like, "Do I really do this this summer? Like, what did I just do?" Obviously, I decided I'm going to start my own company, and all the world shuts down. But then there was opportunity. We made the absolute most out of it. So a lot of the big traditional firms where scale is tough, I think you're going to have a really, really hard time recovering. I don't know how NAR recovers from this.
So you're betting on the smaller firms like Serhant in comparison to the big firms, for sure. And then for the individual agent, your one piece of advice is similar to what most coaches would say: keep your head down, or what's your one piece of advice for the agent?
I don't think it's just keep your head down. I think it's learn as much as you can. I don't think the consumer is as aware of the lawsuit as you think they are because remember, like when everything's forefront for you, that's all you think about. But I mean, like, you know, you have clients that are probably, you know, investment bankers. How often are you reading Barron's, right? You're probably not. And so everything that they're so nervous about, "Oh my God, my customer knows everything," dude, you have no idea. You're like, "Hey bro, do you have, can I open a bank account?" Like, you don't know.
I wanted to just take my Fidelity account and send it to my guy that has my other investments so I don't have to look at it. Exactly, you don't know. And so, you know, I think some people bring it up, and I think you just have to get smarter. Just take the time to get smart, really learn it, understand what the lawsuit was, why it was won, understand what the copycat lawsuits are going to be about, understand where your value actually comes in, and the minute that lawsuit gets discussed, be able to talk about it intelligently and say, "So glad you brought that up. Here's what's going on, and here's how the industry is moving forward."
Because houses aren't going away, and salespeople aren't going away. The more information becomes digitized, the more human beings who buy and sell homes need a human being to help advise on that process. Otherwise, we would have been done away with a long, long time ago.
I should have known you'd take that approach because you don't take the lazy way out of anything. A lot of people are like, "Just keep your head down, ignore it." Not the right answer. The answer you gave is the answer: know everything about it, spend the time on it like you do on the emails, like you do on building your business. You spend the time; you do the hard work.
I also don't think it's discounted fees is the answer. Like, I've seen a lot of these kind of smaller prop tech firms who are like, "Haha, finally, the traditional way of doing things is dead." I'm like, "I think the opposite is going to happen." My biggest fear with this is that like Ryan of 2009, when I first got in the business, I don't know if I would have had the wherewithal to go through the process of being able to explain myself to—and if I didn't have the right training and everything, maybe the business just would have been too hard, which means the listing pool and the power for the buyers ends up going into the hands of a few.
The whole reason that you had that 50-50 split with NAR and with other agencies was to protect everyone across the board. So you didn't have all the power just in the hands of a few, and this might reverse that process. You know, I mean, I already know there's agents in New York City who are total dicks who are already going to their sellers saying, "Hey, we don't have to work with buyer agents anymore. I've got you 6%." Right? We're going to PZer to theide, and what's the going to say if that's what's being told to them? There's no class action lawsuit against that behavior.
Yeah, and that's not the right behavior for the consumer. I could just spend a whole another hour on this one topic with you; it's fascinating. But the Broke Agent, Leonetti, want to do some content with you for the book and for, yeah, he's like scratching at the door right now. He's like, "Come on, don't you know?" Here, they're trashing your office; it's one of the two. But we've got the BAM Pro Bowl on February 7th. You're going to be keynoting it. Make sure you get your free seat for that.
Let us know in the comments too if you like Ryan back on some BAM content. I know I would; I could sit, been a while, man. I could sit here for an hour or two with you. A while, but tell us what's in the book. I know I was going through it; there's a lot here. I know you poured a lot of hard work into it. What's in the book, and why should we grab it?
Oh yeah, everybody should read it, by the way. So the way I always thought about building a great sales career, because that's what this is all about, this is not about like teaching you how to sell one banana one time. So I thought about it as three phases. Phase one is you have to learn how to sell, like you brought up at the beginning, like how to follow up, how to be a professional, you know, how to structure your day as an entrepreneur. All that stuff was in "Sell Like Serhant," which was my first book, and then that's your toolkit.
Okay, I got my toolkit, but if I don't have the confidence to use my toolkit, if I don't have any direction on how to set goals, if I don't think that I can actually put it to use, then the toolkit stays in the closet, and I'm just going to have a regular job. So that was what "Big Money Energy" was, and I wrote that book like lightning speed because I wrote it during COVID while also building the company, all about how to be future you so that you can take the toolkit that I just gave you and actually put it to use and be you two years from now, right now.
And then it was like how to dress; it was super tactical and all that. But then the third and final piece, and potentially the most important piece, is, okay, so you know how to sell anything you want, you have the confidence to actually go do it, but if no one knows what you're selling, how are you going to sell it? You can't make any money. So how do you generate lead flow in today's world?
I actually wasn't intending to even go through this. I sort of thought, okay, there's probably tons of books and videos on how to build a personal brand or the brand of a product, and everything that I found was just super dated and just not really written by someone who'd actually done it from scratch, from the ground up. Like, that's this is it. This is the end of my selling trilogy, right? From "Sell Like Serhant" to "Big Money Energy" to now "Brand It Like Serhant," and then we're out. Writing books takes a lot of time, and I have a lot of other things on my plate.
It is everything that I know about how to build a brand from scratch, whether you're building it for you personally or you're trying to build it for a product. The big difference with this book compared to the others is I actually interviewed a lot of people, like really amazing gold nuggets about brand building from everyone from the classics, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk to like, I don't even know. I got Kenneth Cole to allow me to interview him, just like random, you know?
Was he a client, or you just made a connection? No, I followed up, followed up, I followed up. I picked like 50 people where like, okay, they've done brand in a different way, you know, from him to Steve Madden to like a lot of influencers. I interviewed a lot of influencers kind of across platforms and, you know, other authors and people who just built brands in their own way to ask them their definition and how they would go about doing it, what were their biggest mistakes, so I could kind of curate it all and put it into this on top of my own stories and brand stories and how I built this business and how we came up with the brand and how we came up with the period and how we've really given it the exposure it needs.
It's fun; you know, people love the period. Yeah, people love the period. So dude, if you had been there, man, like we spent so, so much time trying to come up with the name of this company, and then obviously what we come back to is just my name. But I figured, "Time? No, man, we were com—" No, because I was so nervous. I was like, "Oh, you know, I don't know if you look at every other company, like they're not, for the most part, they're not named after their founders."
Today, that used to be what people would do, but today it's like, "No, man, you want good SEO, right? What's a name everyone's going to remember? What's something natural? Call it like GPS for great property services. Call it, you know, anything else." And then we just came back to the name because there's just, there's not that many Serhants in the world, and it is memorable. More people know me by Serhant than they know me by Ryan.
That's good, you know, just because it's a weird—when Chosak, when you launched with the period, yeah, my partner in Connecticut, Nicole White, some of you listen to know her from The Real Word, she's like, "Oh my God, did you see this logo?" Like, "Yeah, it's cool." She's like, "The period! The period!" She just led, "Stop! Full statement! It's over!" It's what, like I always send it to, you know, I'll say or I'll write in an email like, "Honestly, there's only one choice, and the choice is Serhant." And I don't have to do another piece of punctuation; it's just there. It's there, yeah.
And I do it; it's in all caps. Brilliant! This is why you guys can learn a lot from Ryan on branding and all things selling and marketing. It's there, and whether you're, maybe you have a sister who's opening up a smoothie shop, it sounds like this book would work for that as well. It's not just real estate; it is all branding.
Yeah, we track actually, there's a personal trainer, her name is Sydney, as she builds her own programming and her own company called Self by Sid, teaching personal training and coaching online and building that brand. That's actually the story that tracks throughout every chapter, so you can see what work she's doing. So it's not just like, "Okay, yes, Serhant, you did this, you did that," or "Okay, that's what Gary Vee did," or "That's what that person did."
I've never done that before, and I think it's actually probably the most impactful part of the book, and it shows how well-rounded you are. So thank you for the time. I definitely want to do this again. Is that an agreement? For sure, you will do this again. Dude, whatever you want, man. You're the boss. Ryan is in on BAM; you heard it here first. Thank you for the time.