Once upon a time…
In the interest of telling our story and our top reasons for choosing Keller Williams, I wanted to tell you a little something about myself, and how I came to be in the real estate industry. It’s going to require that I jump into the Way Back Machine for a moment, but bear with me because it’s all relevant.
Back in 2003, I had just finished a decade in the IT field, managing network infrastructure for a large corporate account with EDS. In the course of one week, my entire world changed. You see, that Monday my wife was laid off from her position in the Oil and Gas industry (this was in the wake of the Enron scandal). The following Wednesday, we found out she was pregnant. And the following Friday I was laid off from my position.
What followed was unemployment, a not-so-typical birth, temporary jobs that weren’t a good fit, and as you can imagine – a LOT of stress. My former boss called me one afternoon and said he had a job for me, the same one I was doing in Houston, but this time it was in Lewisville, Texas outside of Dallas. I told him if he’d pay the same, and pay for travel and housing, I’d be there. That led to almost a year of weekly trips to and from Dallas, before I was ultimately laid off again.
One of the friends I had made though told me about some consulting work he was doing for a local Keller Williams office near his home, and setup an interview with the assistant team leader at the Keller Williams office near my home. As I’m sure you’ve probably guessed by now, that interview for an IT consulting gig turned into an agent consultation… and now 20 years later I’m still running my real estate business out of that same office.
Nowadays, I split my time between running my real estate business, managing our investment rental properties, and helping new agents find their callings at Keller Williams Realty through myREfuture.com.
Through the support I received in my market center (what we call offices), I learned that true financial independence and freedom will never come from a 9-5. We build businesses worth owning and legacies worth leaving with real estate as the catalyst. And now, I’ve dedicated myself to helping others follow my same path.
So… now that we’re not strangers anymore, I’ll tell you why I chose Keller Williams and continue to choose it 20 years later despite being recruited by darn near every brokerage in the country and a LOT of big teams over the years:
Culture
When I first started at Keller Williams, the team leader walked me around and introduced me to agents throughout the office. All of them were welcoming and several offered their help should I need it. One agent in particular took me under his wing, was my go-to person for questions, and when he felt I could handle it, even allowed me to cover his business when he was out of town. I didn’t know it at the time, but that person happened to be married to the owner/broker of the market center. We have an amazing friendship still to this day, despite the fact that they have largely stepped out of the day to day business.
Keller Williams believes in God, Family, then Business. That shows up in the very actions of the people I work with every day. I see contributions from everyone every day, volunteers for every event, and sharing of ideas and models on a greater scale than I’ve seen in any career field. KW Cares supports our agents in times of despair, KWKC helps young adults find their paths, and RED Day is STILL the largest single worldwide day of service in the world.
And when Mo Anderson challenged agents at our annual convention to go home and leave a legacy in the communities they serve, OUR market center started a small 501(c)(3) organization that 17 years later has grown into a multimillion dollar 40 room facility that provides free temporary housing for patients battling for their lives.
In my lifetime, I’ve spent my time in primarily three industries. The hospitality industry (food and beverage), the IT industry, and real estate. I’ve never seen an industry or company within those industries that fundamentally believes in its culture at such a high level that it forms the very foundation of how they work. Yes, folks tease Keller Williams agents for ‘drinking the kool-aid’, but its my belief that had they truly taken the time to live the culture, they would never want to be anywhere else.
Technology
Most agents don’t know that we aren’t so very far removed from a time when real estate brokerage was in the dark ages. Agents as recently as the early 90s had to read through listing books, retrieve master keys, show properties then immediately return those keys for the next broker. The internet changed ALL of that. And ever since that time, there has been NO shortage of companies trying to get in between agents, their brokers, and their clients. And thus was created the term bolt-on technology, the idea that agents had to pay for multiple disparate technology solutions and then scramble to somehow make them all work together.
Keller Williams has always placed an emphasis on technology, leading the charge to connect its agents. But even still, there was no one stop solution to allow agents to manage their transactions end to end. That is until Keller Williams decided to stop buying and chose instead to start building. Billions of dollars were invested to build a complete cloud-based solution from the ground up. This solution offered consumers best-in-class websites and mobile apps, fully integrated with KW’s backend management platform, Command.
No other tech platform can even come close to its capabilities. And coming from a tech background, I found it both appealing and that it made sense.
Training
New agents quickly learn that real estate school has prepared them for nothing, other than how to keep themselves from getting sued. True training and business education comes from the broker, and no one provides more training than Keller Williams. We’ve been recognized TWICE by Training Magazine as the best training company in the country – not only in real estate, but across all industries. And it’s not just for new agents. We have training for top producers and for what your broker likely calls the ‘messy middle’… those agents that aren’t new, but that aren’t truly running businesses.
I discovered that I had access to in-person training at least twice a day, every day. I also had access to a vast library of online learning, as well as specialty discussion groups to mastermind with the biggest and brightest in the industry. Tack on a slew of other options like podcasts, books, regional and national training events, and professional coaching and I found that I was limited only by what I wanted to do. There is always another class available to me.
Business Models
I’ve always been the creative type. So when I traded my 9-5 job for my own business, I was excited about the possibilities that my creative nature could manifest. It didn’t take me long to realize that yes, I was putting out some of the most creative content in the industry, but that doesn’t pay the bills if you don’t understand how to attract business. All this even though I had instant access to The Millionaire Real Estate Agent book. I just hadn’t read it yet.
So I did. And what I soon learned was that I hadn’t earned the right to be creative yet. I hadn’t done the work to establish an actual business that fed me leads. There was no need for me to recreate the wheel, when the model was right there in front of me the whole time. And that’s the key. That simple book provided me with four models, the economic model, the lead generation model, the budget model and the organizational model to grow my business as big as I wanted it to be. All I had to do was follow it.
Commission Structure and Profit Share
You would think that the commission structure would have been first right? You would be wrong. I came to KW from a different field altogether so I didn’t even know that there were different commission structures between brokerages. I eventually did learn, but by then it really didn’t matter to me. The split structures among large brokerages all had their pluses and minuses, but I understood I was with the top training organization in the world. The money would come if I trusted the process.
Next came profit sharing. I would get paid simply for sharing my love of the company and helping it grow. I received cash payments, not restricted stock rewards, allowing me to invest however I chose. Since Keller Williams operates as an open book company, I could see exactly how the money was earned and distributed.
Over the years, various offers have enticed me with better commission splits, lower fees, and promises of profit share or (cough) revenue share programs, all claiming to surpass what I received at Keller Williams. But what I found was that none of them could offer the full package… everything that has kept me here for 20 years.
