How Larry Frawley uses a 15-day protocol to get agents back on track to goal

Larry Frawley00:00

What are you then, by the 15th of the month, if you’re not halfway to your goal, what are you willing to double down on for the rest of the month to get you back on track to your goal? We’re not waiting until halfway through the year to go, “Hey, you’re not halfway to your goal yet. What are we gonna do now?”

00:15We’re doing this every first 15 days of the month. It’s a 15-day protocol. So it’s really going back to the basics. This is a sales-driven business.

Loida Velasquez00:28

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Vulcan7 Coaches & Mentors, where we bring you some of the best in the industry to share with you their tips and strategies so that you can implement in your business immediately. Now, if you haven’t caught up on our previous episodes, make sure to watch them. You can watch them on YouTube or listen to them on your favorite streaming platforms.

00:48So with that being said, I’m gonna go ahead and bring on today’s guest, real estate coach Larry Frawley. Welcome, Larry.

Larry Frawley00:55

Hey, how are you doing today? Thank you so much.

Loida Velasquez00:58

Yes, yes. We’re so excited to have you here. So for everyone that’s listening that maybe is not too familiar with you, just go ahead and give us a little bit about your background.

Larry Frawley01:08

Great. Well, 22 years in business now. So I’m a licensed broker primarily in Texas, but also in North Carolina and South Carolina. So led some teams, and for the last, about a year and a half now, getting close to two years, I’ve been a Glover U coach. So I get the opportunity to coach many, many great agents all over the country and in Canada.

01:36So that’s a little bit about me. And then also, my wife and I, we own a property management company. So if I don’t have enough on my plate already, then I add property management and running a brokerage. So Texas Boutique Realty is our real estate company, and then H-Town Living is our property management company.

Loida Velasquez01:56

Awesome. Awesome. So obviously, you have a lot of real estate experience. Something that I love to ask agents just like yourself that now are coaching other agents is I wanna know kind of how it started with you back when you got into the business, because I think it’s awesome to see kind of the transformation and everything that has happened ever since you first said, “I’m gonna do this.”

Larry Frawley02:18

Yeah, I love that. So I used to be, and we all came from something, so I used to be a UPS driver, over the road. And interestingly, I bought a home, and the broker kept calling me after I bought. And I’m thinking, “He must think I have a lot of money. Now he wants me to buy another home.”

02:34Well, he was really working the business, right? He was really working for referrals. And my goal was to be in business for myself doing something. So real estate became the first place to go. So I got a license. This was up in Cleveland, Ohio. Got a license up there, sold for a few years, stepped away from being the over-the-road UPS driver.

03:02Loved the company, great company. Didn’t necessarily always like working for somebody else and wanted to work for myself. So that’s really what kind of got me started into real estate and got me the hook on real estate just in general.

Loida Velasquez03:16

So you got started with that, you left your UPS job.

03:20At what point did you start to build a team and kind of what does that look like now?

Larry Frawley03:25

I love that. So yeah, great question. So let’s see, it was 2005, early 2006 really when I stepped away from UPS. I retired early. Didn’t really have probably enough money at that point really coming in to do that, but my goal was, once again, to be in business for myself.

03:46For those of you that have been in business that long, you remember those markets were really good markets, and I’m thinking, “This is great.” So then I was with a little independent broker up there, and I moved to RE/MAX at that time, and then started building a team.

04:04I will say I probably started building a team too early. However, then I was able to catch up and kind of do it in the right way. So 2000, we came out of that market, once again, very, very tough market. I said then it was like, you were amazed when you were showing property and there was actually furniture in the property.

04:26You’re like, “Oh, hey, somebody actually lives here,” right? Because we had so many vacant homes on the market at that time. I started working short sales. I started working foreclosures, right? Just very, very different markets. Sometimes it was kind of depressing to walk into a home where there was still a family there and you knew they were getting foreclosed on, and the bank hired you to go in and take pictures and have a conversation before the home went active on the market.

04:54So that was just part of that. The team, I built a team. I came back from a training event, I’ll never forget it, out in Las Vegas, and I hired my first coach at that point, and I knew right away that I probably need to reorganize the structure of my team.

05:15So I came back and I did have to let some people go, and then I hired some new people, and then I kind of did it better, the right way. So yeah.

Loida Velasquez05:26

So when it comes to teams, and just to quickly touch on that, you said you went to this event, then you kind of restructured how that was going.

05:34What are some of the mistakes that you see agents make when they’re trying to start a team, or maybe they’re doing it too early when they really shouldn’t?

Larry Frawley05:42

Yeah, I think number one, you’ve gotta make sure that you’ve got a good amount of income coming in. Gary Keller says it great, it’s really about thirty-six transactions that he feels like an individual agent could actually do by themselves.

05:59And we know that thirty-six isn’t scattered over the whole 12-month period, right? There’s the very busy months where an agent’s kind of pulling their hair out. We do that now even with some of our Glover U coaches that are now building some big, amazing businesses, and now it’s time to hire, right?

06:19It was the third hire that I finally made where I actually got my admin, where, the goal I always say when building a team is that that team member has got to be challenging you, especially on the admin side. Because I’m good at sales. I’m not very good at telling you what you have to do, right?

06:41I need some self-starters. And it’s actually building the team in the right way. Making sure the person on the team has got the right DISC personality. So the high D, high I, high S, high C, so you want somebody more analytical, that can really take care of the things that you’re not very good at.

07:00And the other thing is, long to hire. Long, long to hire. Take your time hiring. Follow the process, right? Early on, I was not very process-driven. I’ve gotten better. I’m still not perfect at it, but follow the process. If you follow the process, there’s a statistically better chance that you’re gonna get an amazing hire.

Loida Velasquez07:24

Hm. I love everything that we’re talking about, and you’re mentioning quite a few different things and topics that I think are so important. Another thing that you mentioned was back 2005, 2006, and we know what happened after that. Obviously, currently, we’ve seen the market change and a lot of different shifts.

07:43So when it comes to the coaching and the clients that you have currently, what are some of the things that you guys are talking about to make sure that they’re staying on top of what they need to be doing and succeeding versus, we’re seeing also a lot of agents kind of leave the business?

Larry Frawley07:58

Yeah. Yeah, I think the whole change with the commission structure, the compensation, right? That’s been a little piece of it as far as the change goes. What we’re really coaching our agents on is, it’s still about, you gotta get on the calls and you gotta…

08:22This is not an easy business, right? We just had deals before falling in our laps. That’s not happening now, right? It’s going back to script practice, and it’s going back to role play with our coaching clients. We have them doing that. By the way, in GloverU, we’ve got some numbers now where our coaching, we’ve got about 18 coaches, and our clients across the country right now, we’ve got more than 85% of them that are up 33% in their business.

08:53A lot of that is the accountability. A lot of that is the basics of real estate sales and really just kind of sales in general, right?

09:03Practice, script, role play, right? We do that even with our coaches. So.

Loida Velasquez09:08

So if someone is looking to take their business to the next level, obviously, 2025 is around the corner.

09:15Let’s say an agent’s wanting to double their business. What are some of the things that they need to start doing, like, right now?

Larry Frawley09:23

Well, I think primarily you gotta focus on what are your sources of business, right? So we focus on at least three sources. So maybe it’s expired calls and for sale by owners, right?

09:35We know that’s probably right now, more than ever, gonna be the greatest opportunity, and that’s why Vulcan7, just selfishly, works so well, because that is expireds, that is for sale by owners. Maybe it’s a huge database-driven business, right? What are you then, by the 15th of the month, if you’re not halfway to your goal, what are you willing to double down on for the rest of the month to get you back on track to your goal?

10:03Right? Our coaching clients, we’re not waiting until halfway through the year to go, “Hey, you’re not halfway to your goal yet. What are we gonna do now?” Right? We’re doing this every first 15 days of the month as a 15-day protocol. So it’s really going back to the basics, right? This is a sales-driven business.

10:22By the way, the other thing that I tell people, I’ll be 67 years old in February, and social media was not something that was really primarily a thought. And yet, what I’ve discovered over time hanging around with a lot of my young agents and my younger coaches is social media is a very, very big piece of that.

10:46So implementing that in your business. Actually writing out content, right? So part of your lead generation time for our agents we’re coaching is writing content for social media. Not posting it until you get your lead gen done, but actually writing content. So.

Loida Velasquez11:05

Yes.

11:06Yeah. Something you mentioned was revisiting and reviewing everything every 15th of every month, and I think that is so important because sometimes as agents, it’s happened to me, where we set these goals and then we revisit it months later. And then when you see that you haven’t hit them, it’s almost like you get discouraged, and then you fall off, and then you put it off.

11:27“I’ll start again next year,” or something like that.

Larry Frawley11:29

Exactly. And that’s really what we’re coming up on, right? We’re coming up on the end of the year and the beginning of a new year. What does your business plan look like? We’re just finishing up our business plans with all of our clients. What does your business plan look like for next year?

11:43What activities, what sources of business are you gonna have in there? And once again, I think, as Jeff Glover says, one of the biggest opportunities right now is really expired calls, right? Practicing your scripts and practicing your role play with other agents in the country.

Loida Velasquez12:02

What advice would you give to a real estate agent that’s doing this part-time that is looking to transition into full-time?

Larry Frawley12:11

I’ve got a couple of those clients, and one in particular, his goal is to get out of his J-O-B by the end of the year. And one of the things we had to work on very early on, because he was a newer agent, was getting into the office, right?

12:29And by the way, what happens when you don’t get into the office? Well, in this regard, he was writing out a check for someone else in the office who was the number one agent in the office, who was always there at 7:30 in the morning, right? It was the accountability part. So a very big piece of this, right?

12:51Coaching, accountability. I always said, I’ve had a coach in my life way back to 2005, right? And that’s made the hugest difference in all of my businesses.

Loida Velasquez13:04

Yeah, absolutely. So if someone is thinking, “You know what? I want to do this. I wanna do this full time.” Can you just briefly share obviously the benefit of coaching and investing in yourself if you’re taking this seriously?

Larry Frawley13:19

Yeah. If you’re taking it seriously, I mean, think about this. I always go back to a sports analogy, right? I mean, it doesn’t matter what great athlete that you’ve seen or what great business owner you’ve seen out there, they all have a coach, right? The successful ones have a coach.

13:36Tiger Woods, when he was at the top of his game, he had multiple coaches, right? And your coach is there just to keep you accountable to hitting your goal, right? Whatever your goal is. An agent that’s coming into the business right now, or an agent that wants to double their business next year, it’s gonna be focused on the one thing that you get to control, your activities.

14:00That’s it. That’s all. We don’t get to control whether the buyers buy, the sellers sell, things fall apart, right? We have zero control of any of that. The one thing you have control of are the activities that you’re putting in your business.

Loida Velasquez14:15

So depending on where an agent is located, sometimes we’re seeing homes are selling very quickly.

14:22In other places, they’re taking a long time. There’s more homes that are coming off the market. What are some of the conversations that you’re having with these agents that maybe do have listings that are taking much longer than they initially thought?

Larry Frawley14:37

Well, and once again, now we’re back to a contact sport, right?

14:41So part of it is circle prospecting. So you’ve got a home on the market that’s sitting there for a while and you better be calling all the neighbors around the area. By the way, and I’ll just give you a plug, Vulcan7, those capabilities are all in that system, right?

15:00Now your circle prospecting calls around there, looking for somebody else who wants to move to the neighborhood. By the way, that’s a way to pick up a future listing down the road, because once again, as sales agents, right, we’re going back to the old school, right? We’re going back to, you gotta contact people.

Loida Velasquez15:19

Absolutely. So tell us a little bit more about the coaching, how agents can get ahold of you, and just anything else that you think agents need to be doing right now.

Larry Frawley15:28

I love that. Well, you can always go to gloveru.com. You can go and you can search all of our coaches’ bios, but you can actually go on there and get a nice little opportunity to get in front of a coach, and I don’t think it costs you any money.

15:41It’s kind of a little bit of a consultation in there. They can reach out to me directly. There’s not an initial cost, but it’s all about their business. Fortunately, I’ve got agents all over the country and in Canada, so it is interesting.

15:59We have some pockets where there’s not a whole heck of a lot of homes that are on the market, and then we’ve got other areas where there’s quite a few. My Canadian clients, I’ve got two of them, and their market always, I hate to say it this way, but Canada does a good job.

16:15They keep their financial networks more like this along the way. So, but yeah, I think it’s really important to have some sort of accountability, have some sort of script practice and role play in your life and in your business.

Loida Velasquez16:31

Awesome. Well, Larry, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

16:35I know that everything that you said and mentioned is going to definitely help the agents watching this. And just one last mention of you, where agents can go and visit you, your website. Go ahead.

Larry Frawley16:49

Yep. Yep. So website’s texasboutiquerealty.com. You can just send me an email, larryfrawley@gmail.com, or phone number 713-899-7394.

17:02Send me a text, give me a call.

Loida Velasquez17:04

Perfect. All right. Thank you, Larry, for being here, and everyone, we’ll see you on the next one.

Larry Frawley17:08

Thank you.

Loida Velasquez17:08

Bye.

Larry Frawley17:09

Bye-bye.