Kendra Cooke- Serve 100 Families Per Year in 40 Hours Per Week

Welcome back to the Think Bigger Real Estate Show. I'm your host Justin Stoddart and I am so excited today to introduce to you somebody who was recently introduced to me who has just created a magnificent legacy in real estate. She's the kind of person that is giving back to the community and I'm privileged and honored to have her here sharing with the Think Bigger Real Estate audience today. So I want to start by welcoming Kendra Cooke to the show. Kendra, welcome. Thank you for coming on today.

Thank you so much Justin. I'm very excited to be here.

Thank you. So, a little background on Kendra. Kendra has been serving annually over a hundred families on a consistent basis while working, this is the kicker, while working less than 40 hours. I'm so excited to dig into that because that's not what most people experience or think is a reality if you're serving that many families. In addition to that Kendra also serves as senior leadership within The Core Training for real estate agents. So again, not only is she producing at a very high level, but she's giving back and serving and coaching and training at a very high level. So again, thank you for being here Kendra. I know some of the questions that are probably in the minds of people is, number one, where do your leads come from? To serve over a hundred families a year, there's got to be some sort of online lead generation mechanism. True or false?

False.

False?

No generated leads from the Internet, 100% percent referral based business.

Wow, and over a hundred families and that's coming by referral.

That's right. And so what you should really try to achieve in your career is to build a relationship based business. So building relationships with people and casting a deeper net versus a wider net. So what I figured out is if I would work with people who knew, liked, and trusted me from the get-go, then they respected my boundaries, they respected my family time, they respected me. And so there wasn't that disconnect. And you shouldn't show me houses 24-7 and you shouldn't always be on call. I got to work with people who, when they were referred to me, were like "Hey, so and so said you are the best I should work with you." So it goes from a relationship of selling them to a relationship of building deeper relationships which warrants continued referrals.

I love what you said Kendra. I want to go into this a little bit more and expound upon your analogy here of "instead of a wider net, a deeper net." Now, I'm not a deep sea fisherman, but I know well enough that these big fish fishing boats in Alaska, they don't just have nets on the surface, but they have nets that go down very deep because that's where the better fish are at.

That's right. We want to chase the bigger fish, right? So you want to have business partner relationships, you want to have VIP relationships and then you will have your database relationships. And so when we talk about going deeper, it's not a surface relationship. So the people that are in my business referral network, or in my VIP group, I know their families, their children, their hobbies, their charities. I want to be in the flow with them if you will. So, you know, if we're going to a charity event and I know somebody is very passionate about that charity event and they are a business partner, referral partner or whatever, I want to bring them with us. So now we connect on a deeper level. Real estate has become such a transactional business for the most part because leads come in from the Internet. We don't really have a relationship. We have a transaction, we get the money and we run to the bank and it's over. And it was always really shocking to me that we tell everyone we want to be your Realtor for life, yet when the transaction is over, we're done. And so I just found that is a really crazy concept. So I feel like if I stayed in relationship with these people and we connected on a common bond, whether it was community involvement or I'm a runner. You might see the medals back there. I love to run, I love to meet people in the community that run. I love to run for charity. So if I can bond on a connection with the charity or a hobby or a community involvement, that relationship is just really consummated on a relationship versus a transaction, if you will.

I love that. So valuable to the real estate community to hear what you're sharing right now. You segmented your database into three different parts. Would you go over that again?

Yes. So the general database is about 400 people in our general database. These are people who have bought and sold with us. Maybe my kids' families or their friends and family. So, their contacts, if you will. I'm one relationship with them, but maybe not deep relationships. Those people may refer you once every three to five years. Okay. So if you have 400 people, let's say you get 15-20% of those that refer every single year. We didn't generate some leads for you but not a plethora of leads. And then we go to the business partnerships that we have and those are people who can refer you a couple times a year. They have the opportunity, whether they're a financial planner or a banker or private banker or something like that.

And then my VIPs are really people that I'm really, really, really in the flow with, meaning that they might refer me four to eight times a year. So that could be a builder or that could be a developer. That could be somebody that you really connect with on all levels of life and they're continuously filling you with referrals. So I think you really have three buckets, if you will. I know when I first got in real estate, my bucket was just to chase everybody and there's only so many hours in the day. I want better relationships and deeper relationships versus just throwing myself out there for everybody. So those are my three buckets if you will, my VIPs who are really in the trenches with us and are very heavy on helping us lead gen, the business referral partners who have three to five per person per year. Then your database is going to turn over some general leads for you every single year.

Those three groups right there are responsible for helping you serve over a hundred families a year.

That's it. That's it. I don't buy any leads from anyone. I won't say I've never tried it. We tried it with a partnership with a lender one time. They're like, we're going to generate all these leads and it was the most miserable 30 days of my life for me and my team. And I just at that point said, that's not my business model.

Let's talk about that a little bit. It's probably a perfect segue into the next topic we wanted to cover, which is creating boundaries. I would imagine that those 30 days were miserable because those boundaries that you had set up so well started to disappear. True?

Yes, and that usually happens when you come from fear or a scarcity mindset, if you will. Where's my next deal going to come from? Where's my next lead going to come from? So, every time the phone rang, you jump. Or every time somebody wants to see a house, even into 7:30 at night, when you're in the middle of dinner with a family member or friends, you have to jump and go. And those boundaries go out out the window. And when you get referral business referred into you, it's usually, "Hey, you saw my neighbor's house, took great care of them, you're involved in the community, etc." When I sit down and do my listing presentation I say "These are our work hours, 8:30 to 5 and we work by appointment only on Saturday. We're closed on Sunday." People accept that. Just set the expectation and tell them what it looks like and then just adhere to it. But what happens is maybe business slows down a little bit and we start letting our guard down. And somebody texted you at seven o'clock at night and you text them back. You just gave them pe...