Diversified Marketing, Strong Leadership, and Providing Value has Led This Team to Success

Who should listen: Agents looking for solid advice about diversifying their marketing, leading a team, and adapting to industry changes.

Key idea: Being omnipresent across a myriad of marketing channels is critical to create the top-of-mind awareness necessary to garner clients, prospective clients, and referrals.

Action item: Add another marketing channel to your mix, and use it to provide education to clients and prospective clients.

As is the case with many real estate agents, Gusty Gulas’s original career plans did not involve buying and selling homes. As he tells his story during this week’s episode, he “haphazardly got into it.”

But that didn’t stop him from becoming wildly successful at it.

In the past two years, Gusty and his team of 30 agents have sold 850 homes in the greater Birmingham, Alabama, area.

How he did it is no great mystery—we’ve been talking for years about the same strategies that he’s implemented so successfully.

They are strategies worth revisiting, and it’s always useful to our listeners to hear how one of their peers skillfully puts theory into practice. In this episode of Stay Paid, Gusty shares how he’s diversified his marketing, managed to develop a high-performing team, and stay relevant as the real estate industry moves in new directions.

He ensures he is marketing where his audience is

It’s not by accident that 65% of Gusty’s clients are people he knows, past clients, and the referrals he’s received.

How do you achieve that kind of client mix?

You diversify your marketing to the point where you become inescapably omnipresent.

As you listen to his interview, pay attention to the large variety of marketing opportunities Gusty uses:

• He’s active in working with local nonprofit organizations;
• He hosts a radio show that’s broadcasted across three stations;
• He actively uses the phone to call people;
• He uses a ReminderMedia print publication (ReminderMedia produces Stay Paid);
• He serves on several boards; and
• He consistently uses all the other typical marketing tactics familiar to agents.

When building his team, he listens to his gut

Gusty decided to create a team when he could no longer maximize his own value.

He began with an assistant and started to hire agents as his business grew. Among his first agents were friends and people in his sphere who approached him. They saw how successful he was, and they wanted to explore real estate for themselves.

Gusty admits that he often hires agents and operational support based on gut feelings. He needs to feel like a candidate will put in the effort, work well in the culture they’ve created, mesh with the team, and be someone he would send to a client as his representative.

If you hire well at the beginning, you’ll avoid problems later down the road.

When it comes to motivating his agents and keeping them accountable, he wants to be the best training brokerage in Birmingham. He understands that the best way to motivate and retain agents is to get them paid, so his training is intended to help them close their first deal as quickly as possible.

He strives to provide value

As we all know, there is quite a lot happening in the real estate industry. Despite the market disrupters, the incredibly low inventory of homes for sale, and the inflated prices people are willing to pay for houses, Gusty is a top producers who believes service and value are still at the center of a winning strategy.

As he says, if you can provide value, you will win the business.

So it’s no surprise that Gusty wants his agents to be the most convenient and the easiest agents clients will find to work with. His goal is to provide a “stressless” experience.

Sometimes that may mean he partners with an iBuyer.

Other times, it may mean he becomes an iBuyer. (He talks about just such an occasion when he recently acted as such.)

He’s now affiliated with eXp Realty because, as he explains, he’s a student of the industry. He saw what was coming and made the change because he believed it would benefit his agents. And he appreciates the technology that is available to him.

Listen to his interview to hear more about Gusty’s thoughts on marketing, creating a team, the state of the industry and market, and the role of today’s brokerages.

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Website: https://www.gustygulasgroup.com/

Social media: @GustyGulas