Kurt Dupuis:
Welcome to The Whole Truth, where two wholesalers help financial professionals build great practices and thrive in a rapidly changing industry. We'll bring you the stories and voices from those on the front lines of this change, and we'll have some fun along the way.
Steve Seid:
We're building a community of financial professionals who are growing, forward-thinking and want to get better. Thanks for listening and contributing to the discussion.
Disclosure:
The views expressed herein are those of the participants and not those of Touchstone Investments.
Steve Seid:
And welcome everybody to The Whole Truth from the Bay Area, California. I am Steve Seid.
Kurt Dupuis:
And from Atlanta, Georgia, I am Kurt Dupuis. We have a bit of a different kind of episode for you. So we have an interview with a guy named Stacey Wyatt. He's a buddy. He helped me buy one of... We've owned two houses here in Atlanta. He helped me buy our second one. Friend of a friend, got to know him pretty well, and he's just a really interesting guy. He has gone from the corporate space to the business world as a realtor. And so I thought it'd be interesting to kind of pick apart some of the parallels between the business, the businesses I should say, that he has created and is growing and financial professionals.
Steve Seid:
I think it's kind of cool sometimes to look at people that are in somewhat similar roles, just not in our industry and look at what they're doing because oftentimes, we're so stuck in our own lane and what we know and our industry that there's things we can learn from other people in other industries.
Kurt Dupuis:
Totally. And the parallels were abundant. I mean, there's a lot of them. So couple of our takeaways, one of his first comments was early on in his career how he realized that his highest and best use of his time was doing showings, networking, getting out there, not doing the day-to-day administrative stuff. So I think we've over-quoted this, we're going to have to start buying trademark licenses or something, but we talk about spending 80% of time with clients rather than keeping control of a schedule, dealing with the administrative stuff of contracts. I had to outsource that.
Steve Seid:
The reason we repeat it is because it's not the normal state of the industry. Most financial professionals are not spending that time exclusively with clients. In fact, more and more time is getting pulled out for things that are not client facing. So that's why we're so, I think, adamant about the concept.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, had lunch this week with the guy, two advisors on the team, and they have half of a CSA dedicated to them at their shop. And it's just like there's no way having more administrative resources can't help you be more efficient. So that's the conclusion of my TED Talk. That's the end of my rant. But it's funny how that almost immediately came out of his mouth.
Secondly, I don't hear a lot of financial professionals talk about this, but talking about evolving from a solo realtor to a small business owner with staff and the hiring and the firing and all of that, but deciding, first of all, that he had to be a leader. No longer am I just a solo production person. I have to be a leader in this organization that I'm creating. But secondly, the type of leader that he wants to be. But he used the word serving or investing in his people like numerous times. And I don't know for everybody else, but that's the type of leaders that I'm drawn to, not managers who just have to check the box with someone that leads. And I could use more of that in our business.
Steve Seid:
One way that we can evaluate it is just longevity. I always talk about that with the management team at Touchstone. It's like if we can take the average tenure of a wholesaler or a person on our desk and take that number from them, totally making it up, four or five years to six, seven, eight. I mean, you want to talk about meaningful benefit to our business. And that's the type of leadership that I think can make those things happen.
Kurt Dupuis:
Totally. And then the third thing, and this was probably one of the original reasons I wanted him on the show, was this guy is so creative about funny, witty, often cheesy marketing touchpoints, just really creative things to just continue to stay in front of people while also recognizing the challenge and taking that from a superficial top of mind marketing approach to converting that to deeper relationships, stickier relationships over the long haul. So there's some good tidbits in there.
Steve Seid:
I like the marketing comments, and it's a real lesson for, I think, anyone listening to the show, because obviously we're in a very highly regulated industry and when it comes to communications and blast emails and mailers or whatever you, mass general marketing, we're restricted. But that doesn't mean you have to be so rigid with everything. I spent some time on this with our team. When you're sending emails out, write a catchy subject line that makes me want to open the email. How many emails do you get where it's just like, blah. I mean, I don't want to open them.
Kurt Dupuis:
Update on fund, blah. Yeah.
Steve Seid:
Isn't half the battle writing a good subject line that makes me laugh or what's Kurt sending me this time? It's things like that. It's not in violation of any compliance, but it's way more effective, and I really appreciated his approach to marketing in that way. And we didn't get into a million examples, but I think the premise is what's important.
Kurt Dupuis:
But something that's less applicable to the compliance apparatus is a fall festival or an event around the NCAA basketball tournament, just doing social fun things, less conflict there with compliance. And then that's part of staying top of mind, getting people together, being a connector of people, which tend to be good for any client facing sales activity type of business.
Steve Seid:
That's something we're going to have to explore in the future because when I'm talking about doing events sometimes with financial professionals, some will say, "Well, we'll do them, but we don't really get a great response rate or we get a lot of the same people." And then you'll talk to other people like Stacey, like other financial professionals we deal with that do these events and they talk about hundreds of people going to these things. And I'm like, well, is it just the type of client? Is it what you're putting together? So there's something to explore there, I think, in the future on the show. So stay tuned. We're going to get into that interview with Stacey in just a second.
Prior to that, I wanted to bring up something interesting on the business development side very quick that was sent to Kurt and I this morning, which I thought was very good. It was sent by our colleague at Touchstone, Mike Jones. Shout out to Mike Jones. He's one of these guys that I think a lot of companies have him. He's like a jack of all trades. If you need something-
Kurt Dupuis:
He has all the jobs.
Steve Seid:
He has all the jobs. I don't even understand it. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't even slow him down, but he just is in the middle of everything. It's kind of crazy. So he sent out this email to our sales force and I thought was particularly good. These are sales statistics. The source on this is National Sales Executive Association. Don't know how they studied this, but I thought this was really good. 48% of salespeople never follow up with a prospect. Now that seems crazy, but also when you're running from meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting, things fall through the cracks. 25% of salespeople make only a second contact and stop. So we follow up, but we're only touching these people two times.
12% of salespeople only make three contacts and stop. And only 10% of salespeople make more than three contacts. Okay, so you see what's going on there. If you make three or more contacts with a prospect, you are on the 10th percentile or 90th percentile depending on how you want to look at it. Okay? Now contrast this 2% of sales are made on the first contact. 3% of sales are made on the second contact. 5% of sales are made on the third contact. 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact. And of course, 80% of sales are made on the fifth to 12 contacts. So Kurt, you see where we're going with these statistics.
Kurt Dupuis:
I can apply my learn slow university math to this, shout out to LSU, but I think that means we should reach out to people more.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. And be more persistent and have pipelines and think about how often we're touching people. I mean, again, in our industry, the reality is the wholesaler that's getting on, going to an office, seeing whatever amount of people that they're seeing in a day six to 12. But are you really good about going back and touching all those, checking those boxes before you meet the next six to 12 people? I think there's a real lesson in this.
Kurt Dupuis:
This isn't financial services. This is salespeople across the board.
Steve Seid:
It's everything.
Kurt Dupuis:
Struggle with this.
Steve Seid:
So anyways, hopefully that those stats will get you inspired today. Let's transition to our interview with Stacey Wyatt.
Kurt Dupuis:
And welcome to our conversation today with my friend and part-time real estate agent, Stacey Wyatt. How you doing buddy?
Stacey Wyatt:
I'm good, brother. Yourself?
Kurt Dupuis:
Awesome. Well, so Stacey's got a unique story, but I think there's a lot of parallels for the folks listening out there. So first of all, how he went from a real estate agent to a business owner and what that transition looks like because I know it's something a lot of our clients are going through right now, and as a business owner, how you think about leadership and leading a team, not simply managing a team. And then he has got some of the most creative little marketing things that I've ever seen. So I don't know if we're going to call this episode guerilla marketing, but when I think of marketing and great ideas to get in front of people, I think of Stacey Wyatt. So thanks for spending a few minutes with us today.
Stacey Wyatt:
Yeah, I love it. Thanks for having me.
Kurt Dupuis:
So tell us a little bit about your background personally and professionally.
Stacey Wyatt:
When I came out of college, I started doing commercial construction building basically big buildings. In '06, '07, and '08 worked for a residential home builder, and then we all know what happened in basically '08, '09, rode the market down to the bottom in 2010. And once the market crashed and nobody was lending money, the company I worked for owned about a billion dollars in land holdings, but nobody’d give us any money to build anything on it. So we all saw our pink slip coming as we were finishing up projects. So I had a big decision to make in, actually, I believe it was June 5th of 2009, not that I remember that date for any important reasons other than my wife was home with a one year old. I come home on a Friday without a job. Saturday morning she tells me, "Oh, by the way, we're pregnant with number two."
Kurt Dupuis:
Ooh!
Stacey Wyatt:
So to say the least, it was a little shocking, but that was really probably one of the bigger turning points from going from the golden handcuffs of the corporate world…
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.
Stacey Wyatt:
Right, where I had that security with the big paycheck and the car and all that fun stuff of corporate. And I made the decision to get my real estate license. When everybody else was getting out, I was getting in. So kind of some Warren Buffett stuff there. I started as a solo agent. I didn't know what a book of business was. I was like, hey, you got to go grow a book of business. I'm like, okay, I know how to build stuff. What is a book of business? So when I was starting out solo, it was figuring out, man, you got to do everything. Okay, I got to go find the business. Once I win the business, now I got to service the business.
I was used to working for big companies that were very polished, had great customer service, had systems in place for people to come in and win. Well, I quickly noticed, I'm like well, I'm kind of an entrepreneur now. So I got to figure it all out, right? To speed forward, basically, I went from a solo agent, right?. I knew within six months I needed to hire a full-time admin.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.
Stacey Wyatt:
I was going to have to make a commitment. And this is what scares most real estate agents because all they see is a $50,000 salary or $60,000 salary in Atlanta, at least for a full-time admin because I knew if I'm out hunting business, I can't be the one back in hammering on the computer and floating paperwork around and setting up systems. I need somebody to do that.
Kurt Dupuis:
If you don't have an EA, you are the EA.
Stacey Wyatt:
Correct.
Kurt Dupuis:
That's it.
Stacey Wyatt:
A hundred percent. Well, and then the second lesson I learned is I always need to be one person away from the job I don't want to take back. However quickly learning that a lot of my time was spent on the road, driving around showing people houses, and I love houses. It's in my blood. I joke all the time that I've never gone to a real estate agent retirement party, but I will be one of those people you roll me into my last closing just because I love it, but I quickly learned that it wasn't the most efficient use of my time.
So then I went out and found an agent, a younger agent that could be a showing assistant. It was my first buyer's agent because in our business, turning the key and opening a door is not where my value is. My value is negotiating and arm wrestling.
Kurt Dupuis:
I love watching you negotiate.
Stacey Wyatt:
Yeah. On the buy side or on the sell side, I'm out for blood. So I'm just savage on that side of it. So that was the beginning of the journey and it's grown now to where I think we're about 16 total people on our team, between agents and staff on our real estate team.
Steve Seid:
I want to get into the industry itself because it so we can all understand your industry better and then make parallels to our world.
Stacey Wyatt:
A lot of parallels.
Steve Seid:
Let's get to some basics. So in my mind, I found a real estate agent how, via referrals, and then I Googled, and is it mostly predominantly a referral based business? How do you differentiate?
Stacey Wyatt:
It's a great question. I would assume most businesses from, you guys I know are in the financial space. A lot of my friends are entrepreneurs and we tend to work with who we know, like, and trust. I mean, that's typically always it. So a referral is always going to be your strongest. Referrals are typically your highest return on investment because there's not that client acquisition cost. Just for an example, 82% of our business last year was sphere of influence, past client or referral from one of those. Sphere of influence, past clients, people you trust that you can love on are going to be your best referral source. And we all like that. I mean, we want to know somebody that, hey, they had a good experience with this person. I think they're going to be a good match. Give them a call. So that's always been a big pillar.
Now, in scaling business, we can talk, I know what guys want to talk about scaling business. There's a piece of what we call "have not mets," people we haven't known, and there's reason we do marketing and advertising where we've got to add that to the mix to be able to scale the business. I swear in Georgia we're getting close, and I got to imagine that somewhat similar in the financial space, financial planning space. How are we going to differentiate ourself, right? In the sea of agents? One was I definitely wanted to get a strong brand and have my brand out there, right? And Kurt knows, and he laughs all the time. Everything I wear, I've got branded shirts, hats, shoes. It's impossible to go around my neck of the woods and not see our stuff somewhere. I don't have a 50 million dollar marketing budget like Starbucks or Home Depot.
So for me it is kind of guerilla marketing. But to answer your question on differentiation, one is I just find out where people's pain is, right? Where is their pain? For a lot of our clients, we typically work with a lot of dual income professionals or a lot of professionals that have full-time jobs and they want the easy button, right? They're like, "Stacey, dude, you can have the key to my house. Here's the deal. I don't want to hear anything. I just want it done." Those are my favorite clients because they're like, "Hey, I need the grass cut. I need the paint, I need this room fixed. I need the drywall, I need this." So we've got a concierge service that takes care of all of them. We'll get the bids, we'll put it all together. They say, "Hey, yeah, that's cool, man. Make it happen." We get it all done.
So that's one of the things that we do from a concierge service because people want the easy button. Some of the people we call on, they don't want to go through the traditional process. They don't want to list it and have people traipsing through their house. And so we decided, hey, we're going to start offering cash offers on houses. So we've done a lot on that end just from a service level to figure out everybody's got a different pain point. And so we've built a menu of services to where we don't just walk into a client and say, "Hey, we're here to help you buy or sell a house. Here's 10 solutions." I want to be a problem solver. And I think that would be for your business or I mean any business at this point. Entrepreneurs get paid when you add value.
And to me, when you add value, you solve problems in any space. Every time I hear somebody else with a creative idea, I have the best R and D department in the country. I rip off and duplicate everything, a hundred percent. Somebody has a great idea, I'm like, that's smart. I had been doing a concierge service since I started because of my background in contracting. But when another startup, a Wall Street startup came in our space about four years ago, they put a name to it and called it literally concierge. Why didn't I ever think of that? Now I've got a concierge service, right?
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. Okay, so you're answering part of that question is just over the years you've identified problems and you helped solve them and however you package those concierge, whatever.
Stacey Wyatt:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
But I'm looking at this sort of magazine flip book that you sent and all of the different solutions, which is that's the modern age of any higher end service, financial services, real estate, you have to have this menu, in my opinion.
Stacey Wyatt:
A hundred percent.
Kurt Dupuis:
So you clearly had to add more services over time.
Stacey Wyatt:
Correct.
Kurt Dupuis:
My question is so once you identified these problems I'm thinking of... So CORE Club, that's an easy one where you kind of have a bunch of stuff that's available for rent if you're a client.
Stacey Wyatt:
So CORE Club, and that stands for, again, I came up with a fancy acronym, Clients Only Plus Referrals, C-O-R-E, CORE Club, and our clients get to rent that for free. So the thought was is I wasn't going to go out and drop 30 grand on equipment. I didn't have 30 grand at the time, but you know what? I bought a bounce house and the beauty of that is did my kids jump in it when they were kids? Absolutely. And does every client... That thing gets used, that thing probably disappears every weekend. So all of our clients borrow it for free. Now we have a moving van. Now we have a commercial... All that stuff to anybody that's ever been a client or referred us. And some people are like, "Well, what the hell does that have to do with real estate?"
I said, "Nothing." I said, "You trusted us." At this point for somebody to go and throw a birthday party, and Kurt, I know you're probably at this stage, Steve, I'm not sure if you got little kids or not, but man, you go get a bounce house rental, tables, chairs. We do….we have snow cone machines, cotton candy machines at this point. That's three grand of rentals right there. Well, you can back my van up with my ugly face on it, wrapped, moving billboard stuff, all that stuff in there and take it down so your kids can have a party free of charge. Now the only downside is they get to stare at my ugly face on the van and/or the bounce house.
Kurt Dupuis:
And that's significant downside.
Stacey Wyatt:
That is a downside. And we could scare some kids off of the party, but that's guerilla marketing.
Steve Seid:
So let's get into growth at your firm. So you talked a little bit about your origins and how it's evolved. Has the growth been steady? Have there been periods where you hit a wall? What did you do if you hit a wall? I'm curious.
Stacey Wyatt:
I knew I wanted to grow a business, and so at some point for two reasons, I wanted to grow it. Should I choose down the road to get off the hamster wheel of selling houses? Maybe I'm in Costa Rica for three months. My business is still running. That was my first thought. I will say after I started growing an organization, it became more about my people that are working for me and I want them to have big lives. Right? I want to make a difference. And anybody that trusts me to join my company, I take that as a big responsibility and I want to be able to help them grow and pour into them at a really high level so they can achieve whatever they want to achieve. Now, I'll say this, at the beginning it was a what - , what system, what software.
Then it became, and in my world now it's just a who, who, because those are the people that everything now for me is a who. When it was we were selling so many houses and people are like, "Well, Stacey, I see you flipping houses. Can you renovate our house?" I'm like, "I ain't got really time for that." My buddy was leaving corporate, he was burnt out and he wanted to start his own. I'm like, "Dude, come. Let's set up a construction company. You run the day to day, I feed you the business. Life is great." So it was a who. And so we've been steady growth. Now, is that good or bad? I don't know. It's right for me. Did we run into points? Yeah, here's what happens. And I call it the beginning where I'm out of production, meaning I'm not doing the day-to-day selling. And then there's the messy middle.
And I'm telling you, the messy middle is the hardest part. And there's two points I was going to quit and it was in the messy middle because as a salesperson, you got your foot on the gas and selling, and then you're also trying to run a business at the same time. And it's really hard to do because I need to sell, but I need to create systems. I need to hire people, I need to fire people, I need all that stuff. I knew once I started bringing people on, what happens at the beginning, your income skyrockets, but then it takes this short dip, but that short dip's short-lived once you get people, because then at scale you make it up. So you go up, down a little bit and then you take back off. So it was getting that realization that I knew if I could get out the messy middle, the scale was going to make up the money.
But the biggest thing is I started valuing my time more and realizing my time was more important, time with my kids, time with my family time that I could do other things, create other businesses. And so there was some struggles in the growth, and I'm saying that messy middle was really hard in that transition. But then what I got really focused on was one, which was one of the best advice I got is you always need to be one person away from the job you don't want to take back. So first it was the transaction coordination, listing management. I've got two virtual assistants in the Philippines that handle all my marketing and advertising, and then we've got 10 agents on the team. And so I've been able to do that through that growth. So I've been a steady growth. I've poured a lot into those agents.
And I'll be honest with you is there are hard times to where I had to go from... I used to be a really good manager. I was a terrible leader. I was so focused on results that I lost track of people. And people are the most important asset. I don't care what business you're in, I like these people. I want to see these people grow. I've got to raise my leadership lid in order for me to go create more leaders. The farther you move up, let's call it in your leadership journey and you've got more people and you tend to have more problems, it's being able to work through those. And going from what, I forgot who said it, being able to go from problem to problem without losing enthusiasm.
And it took me a while to get there, and I'm still on a leadership journey. I think I'll be till the day I die. But I will say the transition for me was being a manager in that messy middle to like, dude, you got to become a leader. You've got to lead. And what that was was no title. I didn't need a title. I need to be willing... If I have to go clean the bathroom in our office, if I have to straighten a chair, if I have to pick up a paper towel, that's a leader to me. A leader leads from the front, not from the back or from some perch. And so what that has done is I feel like that has built a really strong culture with our organization.
Kurt Dupuis:
So there's the realization that you need to evolve from manager to leadership.
Stacey Wyatt:
Right.
Kurt Dupuis:
You experience the pain of that moment. What resources though, did you lean on to develop that? I mean, you can't just be a leader overnight, so do you have a coach, mentor, books, podcast? How did you lead yourself to become a better leader?
Stacey Wyatt:
I hired a coach, so I had a lot of... I think everybody needs a coach. It's like when you talk to Jordan, Jordan was like, "Don't ever put me in a position not to have a coach." And I knew there was some things... Here's the thing, could I have figured it out? Yes. I think for me, I'm one of those people that I'm just hungry for info. I'll go and find the information, but a coach can cut that journey so much shorter. So I would seek out people that were-
Kurt Dupuis:
And help the execution, not just the ideas.
Stacey Wyatt:
Yeah and stuff that I'm... And blind spots. I'm out here thinking I'm killing it. And he's like, "Dude, no, I've been there, done that. We sold 500 homes last year. You've sold 80. Let me show you really what's happening here." I had coaches for different seasons because as my business grew, things changed. I went from a coach and then I went to a digital marketing coach like, "Hey, we're entering a new arena here. I need a different coach." And so I do think there's coaches for different seasons.
Kurt Dupuis:
Sure.
Stacey Wyatt:
One big thing I did was I got into rooms I didn't belong into. These are people that are doing way more business than I, I was a small fish.
And honestly, I didn't care. I just needed to be in the room. There's power in proximity, and I just went and found the people who are doing business way more than I was, and I just got in there and asked, "Hey, can I come sit in your team meeting? Can I come to your office? Can I talk to your staff?" I just went on this hunt to find out. I wanted to get out of that pain that I was in. It's like, "What am I doing wrong? How did you scale this, this fast? What does your next hire, what does that look like? What do you pay them?" So I just went hunting for it, but I had multiple coaches along the way.
Kurt Dupuis:
So in under an hour, let's talk about your views of marketing. Where do the ideas come from? What are the execution? Do you track ROI? What do your spreadsheets look like when you think about marketing?
Stacey Wyatt:
Yeah, absolutely. So we track everything, right? Like I told you last year, 82% of our business was SOI1, past client or a referral. Every single agent on my team, they all have individual business plans. They all have three lead levers. First lever is sphere of influence, past clients, people that know, love and trust us. And so we actually have a full-blown marketing plan that goes deep to stay in those relationships. One of ours, which you were kind of joking the other day, that cheesy and some people call it cheesy, I like that you changed it because we do say creative, but those cheesy marketing things. And it's funny because some new agents join our team and they're like, "Oh God, don't send that to my people. It's so cheesy." And then when you get a $1.2 million listing because somebody called us up and said-
Kurt Dupuis:
Because of that cheesiness.
Stacey Wyatt:
That is the most, yeah, it's the most creative thing that we've ever seen. And so it's a “top of mind” play. Every single month, we want to be in your mailbox with something creative. And I'll back up one step, every entrepreneur that runs a business, you better be the best marketer in your space or one of the best marketers in your space. I run our marketing. I'm the COO, creator of opportunities, and I'm the director of marketing. So the marketing and advertising to me drives, especially in our space, but I would argue it's probably in most spaces. We do events. We usually try to do big events to where we'll do fall festival to where we literally have a pumpkin patch and face painters and crazy events to where we invite clients to. So our goal is shrink down the community so that we can get closer to them.
And honestly then it's getting to do a better... And this is where we failed in a lot of cases is let's start it from the bottom, some very impersonal communication. So we're in your mailbox, but hey, we're “top of mind”. But I'm going to say it's kind of impersonal in a sense. Hey, it's in mind. Hey Stacey, they're funny, they're creative. But now I say, you got to start working up the relationship chain, right? Well, now we can do an event. Well, that's maybe next on the hierarchy. So you come, but here's the thing. We had 420 people at our house at our last party. There's no way I can physically reach out and I'd like to sit and have a beer with Kurt and talk for two hours about poker and kids and catching up. But it's impossible when you got 420 people and it's just me and my wife, and then our agents are spread out.
My wife and I started talking. It's like we need to start doing private dinners at our house, six to eight people. We'd really want to hang out, want to talk with all the way to a one-on-one meeting. And that's sometimes where we fail because there's been people in our SOI and past clients that have bought without us, and it wasn't their fault. It's not their fault to know me, right? They probably knew me, but you know what? I failed on the relationship. So we've gotten really focused on moving up that pyramid as we're marketing. As far as the creative ideas, my wife typically will come up, my wife or the internet or all this stuff, they'll come up with the creative ideas. I know how I want it to look and feel and add in funny whims. If somebody can come up with the idea, I can turn it into something-
Kurt Dupuis:
You package the idea.
Stacey Wyatt:
I package it. Right? Okay. So Trish, my wife comes up with most of them. We know we got about three seconds once they receive that mailer, one, two, garbage can. So all we're trying to do is stay top of mind, be creative, and stand out in a very crowded audience. And then it's our job from our other marketing and advertising to keep people plugged in. And so I then had to figure out, how do you magnify the brand? How am I standing out in this crowded sea? So the beauty of social media and ads is, and we're getting ready to start this back up, every single person that comes into my website, they get stuffed into a Facebook and Instagram retargeting ad. All of our SOI and past clients would go into a custom audience in Facebook and they would start seeing ads for me, right, in Facebook and Instagram.
Well, then I realized, he's like, "Hey, you've got a van, don't you?" I was like, "Hey, yeah, we got a moving van we let people use." He's like, "You need your ugly face on it." So then I wrapped it, and so now my brand's driving around because our interns drive it. They're the ones drive it, put our signs in. Clients borrow it. So now I'm hitting people on Facebook and Instagram. I got a van driving around all of Atlanta. Then we're in people's mailboxes and we're like, every time we're trying to ratchet it up, we are going to start moving to radio advertising. So my goal is you can't go anywhere without seeing us.
Steve Seid:
It seems like that you do some things that are a little bit fun. I don't want to call silly. Maybe silly's not the right word, but fun to be an attention grab to the point you had mentioned that one of your agent's, "Don't send that to my clients." Can you give an example of that? And was there a hesitancy to have fun with that or is that just…
Stacey Wyatt:
Never.
Steve Seid:
…naturally your personality?
Stacey Wyatt:
Here's how I looked at it, man. It's like, what do they say? There's no bad press, right?
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Stacey Wyatt:
Listen, we fail forward. I'll tell you one funny one. We had and everything... Here's the rule. Whatever creative we come up with has to fit in an envelope. And we want an item of value, so it's crunchy. People are always going to open it, and it's got to be kind of fun and whimsical. So one of our favorite ones was on a house, but it came with this little sticky hand. Dude, you would've thought, I gave people a million dollars. We got 15 or 20 photos with people slapping that damn silly hand on their refrigerator on their car. That was a good one. Here's a fail. There's little honey sticks that you can buy and they're really thin. And my wife said she, because we owe... Well, let's back up.
We sent it out. I forgot what the catchphrase was, right? It was something like, "You get more bees with honey, or we sell more," whatever. There was some catchphrase with it. Well, that honey stick when it ran through the mailers squashed on a couple of them. And when this person, and they've got a $7.5 million listing right now down the street from me, I'd have bought my Lexus from them. I always add everybody to my database. I was told long ago, "Stacey, run a really low... Consider your database a very low end country club. Everybody gets in." And so I've always done that. So I bought that car. Any event, she called me up and she's like, "Hey, I know you guys meant this to be fun, but all my mail's stuck together. Do me a favor. Take me off your mailing list." Right? So listen, creativity to me, for one, I'm going to have fun with it. It is returned us, the ROI on that alone, just for being top of mind.
Kurt Dupuis:
Well, so many corollaries to our business. We talk about that all the time. If financial professionals spent 80% of their time with clients, their lives would be better. Not doing all the admin, EA stuff, that they probably should not be doing. Think about your transition from solo agent to leader, because it's one that a lot of folks in our business are dealing with. They were hired as salespeople. They were good salespeople. That's why they've had longevity and been in this business. But it's evolved and you've had to stack on more services to remain competitive. Some people have adopted that more quickly than others, but not everybody wants to build a 16 person team. And so just people knowing the lane to stick in. And I also love marketing and just thinking about fun, creative ways to reach out to people. So I always appreciate some wins and some honeypot failures because you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take.
Stacey Wyatt:
Exactly.
Kurt Dupuis:
So Stacey, thanks a bunch for your time and sharing some of your wisdom with us. This is The Whole Truth. Stick with us.
Steve Seid:
Welcome back to our Costanza Corner where we like to leave on a high note, and Kurt is going to help us do that today.
Kurt Dupuis:
So I had a band outing, so I've talked about this probably way too much now, but…
Steve Seid:
Yup!
Kurt Dupuis:
I'm in a band or I'm striving to be in a band.
Steve Seid:
You love saying that. You love it.
Kurt Dupuis:
Had a little band outing. We got some shows coming up this fall. Pretty excited about it.
Steve Seid:
Little tour.
Kurt Dupuis:
No, no big deal.
Steve Seid:
No big deal.
Kurt Dupuis:
So I was obviously enthused to find this article about a new meta-analysis study that showed that kids trying to learn math did way better when they were listening to music. So what they did is they took two cohorts. I'm clearly a scientist so I can explain this very well. They had the music group and the non-music group. The group that was listening to music while learning these math problems and learning the math, 73% of the students did better than the non-music crowd. So shout out to all those people that listen to music while they're doing deep work, deep thinking, which I am one of them. I love having that in the background while I'm pecking away at stuff. So there's science behind it.
Steve Seid:
One thing that surprises me about this, and one thing that doesn't surprise me about this. Learning math, I would think it would be kind of a distraction while you're learning math and truly studying, which is very surprising. Why it's not surprising to me is I, unfortunately, I'll admit it to you, Kurt, I'm going to admit to you today, my memory is not what it once was. It's actually a bummer. I actually am trying to…
Kurt Dupuis:
It’s a thing.
Steve Seid:
…do things to increase my memory and to retain more. And while I could admit that, what's shocking to me is if I hear a song, not every song, but a lot of songs, it'll take me back to precisely the time in my life where, you know what I'm saying, where I was listening to that song a lot, or that was a big part like years ago. So I can't remember what I had from lunch two days ago, but if you play me Song X, I'll say, "Oh yeah, that's when I was moving into that apartment three years ago."
Kurt Dupuis:
Yes.
Steve Seid:
That association for me is so powerful. So that's why it doesn't surprise me.
Kurt Dupuis:
That's got to be the underlying aspect of what's going on in this study, right? You're able to connect certain visuals to, especially formulas and stuff, I'm guessing, to songs that were playing at the same time. So it somehow paints a different picture in your mind, easier to recall, something like that. I'm obviously, again, a scientist, so we'll get into the details about that.
Steve Seid:
Well, and you're also in a band, so you're professional all the way around on this.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, obviously. But any chance to have more music playing, I am for, so there you go. Listen to more music. You'll be smarter.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.
Kurt Dupuis:
See y'all. You can find The Whole Truth and subscribe for free on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps others find the show. And for more episodes of The Whole Truth, go to www.touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth. That's touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth, all one word.
1 SOI is an acronym for Sphere of Influence
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