Tonya Eberhart & Michael Carr- Avoid the Cost of Confusion by Mastering your Brand

Alright everybody. Welcome back to the Think Bigger Real Estate show. Boy, I feel honored today to have two people with me here today who are making quite the stir in the real estate industry and the kind of a stir that I think the real estate industry needs. I want to welcome today here on the show, Tonya Eberhart and Michael Carr. You may have heard of these names. They're bestselling authors of the book Brandface. We'll be talking a little bit more about that. A little more on their background here in just a second. Before I go into that, I want to talk about the problem that we're going to solve so, and you're going to want to know who these people are. So the problem that I see so often is, real estate agents chasing, hunting and the consumer feeling hunted, feeling chased, which is not necessarily a good position to be in. Whereas what Tonya and Michael teach is a way to brand yourself to where people chase you where people are anxious to try and find time to get on your schedule. I want to thank both of you for coming on today to discuss this very important topic.

Hey, thank you Justin. We are honored to be here. Thanks for having us.

Thank you so much.

Yeah. So, let's get a little bit more into your background and, and they've got such a comprehensive bio that I won't be able to cover it all. Let me start with you Tonya. You really have become synonymous with building brands in the real estate industry and really helping people stand out in this "sea of sameness." I love how you said that. That's so true here. You know, in the market where I work directly, there's over 8,000 real estate agents just in our city and very few of them really stand out. So many of them say the same things, market the same way, have the same tag lines, have the same posts. I mean, it just looks so much the same. I know that you really specialize in helping people stand out.

Yes, yes we do. So, you know, one of the things that I thought I'd start with Justin is kind of what's going on in today's real estate industry. And that is, it's no surprise to anybody listening today that there are tons of new agents coming into the industry. They're entering or reentering the industry. And then you also have lots and lots of new marketing platforms and tools out there that didn't even exist 10-15 years ago. So there's so many ways to market yourself, but the real problem comes when you mix those two together. You've got all these agents using all of these marketing tools and systems exactly the same way, right? To your point, everybody kind of then starts to look the same and that's why we refer to it as the sea of sameness. And that's not really coming from us. It's coming from all the agents we've been dealing with these last several years. They're saying, oh my gosh, everybody around here is marketing exactly the same. And when that happens they tend to kind of blame the marketing platform. Oh, Facebook ads doesn't work. Um, newspaper doesn't work. Radio doesn't work. Google ads don't work. Zillow doesn't work. Right?! And so that really is not always the truth, right? There are some platforms that are better than others, but most of the time if your ideal customers on the other end of that platform, it should work for you. Most of the time what hasn't happened is they haven't set themselves apart. They haven't differentiated themselves in such a way that they stand out from everybody else. And you've got to do that before you can expect to be treated differently.

You know, I'm a big fan of the book Blue Ocean Strategy and what you're talking about sounds sounds similar to that. You know, what they teach there and I'm sure your book, which I'm so excited to read by the way really takes a concept of standing out and really deeply applies it to the real estate industry. Like, how important is that?

Right? It does. And you know what I'm going to hand this one off to Michael because he's actually the first real estate professional that I worked with with the Brandface concepts and that's actually why he's a partner in the company today. So I'm going to hand that one off to Michael.

Hey Michael, before you get started, let me just share with the audience who you are. They're like, who is this Sean Connery looking figure in the middle of the screen. So, some context here. Michael is actually America's top selling real estate auctioneer and the 'Abundant Life Broker.' During your 26 years experience, you've been actively involved in over 74,000 transactions. Like that's phenomenal; And licensed in as many as 27 states in the Continental US. Now let's talk a little bit about how you guys met. You kind of alluded to it, Tonya, that you actually implemented these ideas in Michael's business. True?

It's absolutely true.

Yeah. The way that all worked out is I was an auctioneer by trade. I still am. And the guy that taught me the industry said, get your real estate license because you might want to call a sale, a farm sale or something like that in rural Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama. So I did. So, then I opened up a brokerage in 2000, but mainly I did it to buy my own stuff and help family members. I really wasn't pushing the idea of an arms length transaction brokerage. And then in 2006, I partnered with a company out of Irvine, California, and we brokered a deal in Georgia and it turned into the Bear Stearns residential portfolio when they went under and we thought they would end up being about three years worth of work. It turned out to be six or seven over the course of that time. And so that's where a lot of those licenses came from. I had an office in Atlanta, had an office in Irvine, California, and an office in Seattle, Washington. And we were just trying to liquidate these properties at the time and praying at the same time that our regular arms length transaction businesses would all come back because I was an investor first and a real estate agent/broker second. I was hoping for the recovery just as much as everybody else was but when that happened and we began to see that that was going to happen, I knew that I needed marketing. And so I went about it on my own and I said, okay, I need to stand out. I need to be different. I need people to notice who I am and why.

But I didn't have all those concepts actually pulled down into one concept of differentiation. I had an agent that helped me start the brokerage. She kept saying, you need to talk to my niece. She's in marketing, she's a genius. She's great, she's awesome. And by that time I was so passed it, I was like, I'd already had heard all the stories. I've heard about this is the path for us and none of them are going to work. Like I was too busy building systems and too busy doing this. And so at the same time she was going to Tonya saying, "Michael is expecting your call. Michael is expecting your call." Or, "You got to help Michael. He's waiting on you to help him." And so we laugh about it now because she's still with us but she sort of tricked me and Tonya in to coming together and then the rest is pretty much magic.

When she came into my life, told me what I needed to do I saw right quick, she knew what she was talking about and I'm like, "Okay, this is a person that can conceptualize all of the different platforms and media that you're using to try to get people to come to you and pull them into one message." She had already been doing that through Brandface for other professionals and businesses and she wanted to apply that to me in the real estate business and it continues to work. We still every day practice all of the Brandface principles in this brokerage and it continues to grow.

You know, I appreciate what you shared Michael because I think there's a lot of real estate agents that maybe fall into a similar category as you, which is they're really, really good at the business of real estate. They really...