How Vance Mizzi uses daily scorekeeping to coach agents at a 550-agent brokerage

Vance Mizzi00:04

Once you’re keeping score and you’re kinda working to make tomorrow better than today and you’re pushing things forward, it’s amazing how quickly your business will absolutely explode as opposed to trickle along hoping to get somewhere. And that’s what I want people to understand.

00:25Look, there is so much room to be successful in this business, and there’s so many agents right now leaving the industry. Now is the perfect storm for brand new agents and established agents to really kick it into high gear and take their career to the next level, because a lot of people are simply not doing it.

Loida Velasquez00:59

What’s going on, everyone? Welcome back to a brand new episode of Vulcan7 Coaches and Mentors, where we bring you some of the best in the industry to teach you their tips and strategies so that you can implement in your business immediately. If you’ve missed any of our previous episodes, go ahead and check them out on our YouTube channel, or listen to them on any of your favorite streaming platforms.

01:22Now, with that being said, I wanna welcome today’s guest, Vance Mizzi. Vance, welcome.

Vance Mizzi01:27

Hi, Loida. How are you doing? Good morning.

Loida Velasquez01:29

Good morning. Welcome. So for everyone that’s listening that maybe is not familiar with you, go ahead and share with us a little bit about yourself and your background.

Vance Mizzi01:37

I am a real estate broker here in the Southern California area, and I help run a large organization, private brokerage, of about 550 agents.

01:49Background comes from financial planning, and moved into real estate when I got tired of the corporate ladder, if you will.

Loida Velasquez02:01

Okay. Awesome. So you’ve been in the real estate game for quite some time, right?

Vance Mizzi02:06

Yeah, over 20 years.

Loida Velasquez02:07

Oh, nice. So for everyone that’s listening, we might have some newer agents, agents that have been in the business five years, 10 years.

02:15Can you kind of share how your journey started and then how it started to transition to where you are now?

Vance Mizzi02:21

Sure. The way I started, I came into the business working as a full-time mechanic and needed to kind of transition. Like most people do, they transition in and they do their changes.

02:35And one thing I heard was if you prospect, nothing else matters, and if you don’t prospect, nothing else matters. So all I did was every night I got home, when I got home from work, I got on the phone and I made my calls and I kept calling and I kept working my way through. And before I knew it, I was listing homes when everyone was telling me I was lucky, when it was really just a matter of, like, I was doing the work that other people simply…

03:06I don’t wanna dig on it, but most people just were not prospecting. And I left the business actually in the late ’90s and went back to New York and worked on Wall Street for 10 years, and worked within that realm and really rose to the top of kinda everywhere I went based on my work ethic through real estate.

03:28So folks, if real estate doesn’t work out for you, there’s plenty of other careers out there. But after 10 years, though, I got really tired of Wall Street, just that grind, and I resigned on a Post-it one morning, called my wife and said, “Let’s move back to California and sell real estate.”

03:47And within three weeks we were back in LA doing our thing, and I interviewed with a couple different offices and I said, “I need a title officer, I need a phone, I need an office. I need everybody to just get out of my way.” And three weeks later I had my first listing, and then it was just off to the races like that.

04:07And that was in 2009 when the whole market was in freefall, and I was taking equity listings simply by calling equity people. So I don’t know if that was a long answer to a short question or not, but-

Loida Velasquez04:19

No, no, that was great. Okay. So you mentioned your wife. Was she also an agent, or is she also an agent right now, and when you guys worked together?

Vance Mizzi04:28

No, actually my wife is my coaching partner. So she’s a personal trainer and a nutritionist, and she, believe it or not, she knocked about 115 pounds off me. I was over 265 pounds at my largest, and now I’m not. So when we put all that together, we started looking at it and thinking like, “How does real estate and coaching and physical fitness and all this stuff kind of blend together?”

05:03So she and I just opened a company this year called Living Better You, and that’s all about working with real estate agents and showing them how to maintain their business and their health at the same time. So that’s where she becomes my partner.

Loida Velasquez05:19

Oh, okay. That’s awesome. I don’t think I see that very often, where there’s also, like, a fitness and wellness incorporated into real estate.

05:26Many times agents are just, like, sitting, or they don’t really look to make sure that they’re eating well or exercising. But I’m glad that you brought up your coaching. Can you tell us a little bit more and kind of what you do with the agents that you’re training right now, versus maybe what other coaches do?

Vance Mizzi05:43

Sure. Again, Maria and I, my wife, we have this two-step program where we talk to you about nutrition, health, wealth, finance, the whole gamut. Being a real estate agent is not a job. It’s a life, and you need to incorporate that into your lifestyle, how you handle your money, how you handle your free time, your work time, your family time.

06:10This is all something that most of us have never been trained on anything like this before in our lives, and then we’re thrown into this world that can literally encompass us 24/7. And if we’re not physically and mentally maintaining our time, we lose it. And that’s where Maria and I kind of come in and start helping people do that.

06:32So my coaching goes a number of different ways. In my office, I do one-to-one mentorship. So as an agent in my office, we do a mentorship program for them. I have one-on-one coaching that I offer, and then we offer coaching programs outside the agency to individual agents, on a one-to-one basis or in group standards.

06:57And my mentorship goes from one-on-one coaching for a specific deal or a career-minded agent who wants to see the bigger picture. So I’ll tell you where to put the signature, or I’ll tell you where you wanna buy the next building. So it’s up to the agent how they want their coaching.

Loida Velasquez07:19

Okay. That’s awesome. And I’m sure based on all of the experience that you had doing real estate all this time, you’ve seen a lot of different things happening. So when it comes to coaching agents, is there anything specifically that you’re covering or going over with them now that maybe you weren’t so much three, four years ago?

Vance Mizzi07:37

More than anything right now, the one-on-one, actual belly-to-belly, hand-to-hand reach out with clients is something that most agents are really shying away from. They’re more involved in social media. They’re more involved in the external thing.

08:05They’re not as knee-deep. And what I tell all my agents is, “You need to do both.” All right? I’m all over social media, but I call every day. Right? I’m on the phone every day. Why? Because who better than myself to be on the phone for at least an hour calling and trying to find business for myself?

08:26And I challenge every agent I coach with one to two hours a day. Right? You can do anything for two hours a day. Years ago, my wife took me to my first Bikram yoga class. I don’t know if you’ve ever done Bikram yoga. But she said, “You can do anything for 90 minutes.” I said, “Okay.” And I’ve practiced Bikram for 12 years now.

08:53And again, it’s that you can walk into anything and do it for 90 minutes, two hours. It’s when an agent says, “I’m gonna prospect all day,” eight hours straight, I caution them on that, because there’s a burnout that maybe you could do it today, but you might not do it tomorrow. And this business is like exercise.

09:15It’s continuous repetition, not a bunch today and nothing tomorrow.

Loida Velasquez09:19

Exactly. And I think along with that comes accountability, because sometimes agents say, “Hey, I wanna do this,” but they fall off, and if no one’s holding them accountable, they’re like, “Okay, well, Vance is a no, so I’m just not gonna do it.

09:33I’ll get back on it tomorrow.”

Vance Mizzi09:35

You see, it’s funny you say it, because through my coaching, one of the things that I have built is an accountability tracker, and I call it the Realtor Blueprint, and it tracks everything an agent needs to be doing, from social media posting, sending out mailers, making phone calls, door knocking, their finances.

09:56I cover every aspect of it for the agent, so they can actually go in and sit down and go through this line by line, day by day, and really kind of check the boxes. I am a check-the-box kind of guy. Right? Everything that I have is just lists of things, and gotta put check marks next to it and make sure it’s done.

10:17So when I built out my accountability tracking system, I did it so an agent can just go in and keep score, because what we keep score of, we can actually improve. And what we focus on expands, of course. But by keeping score, by saying, “I did five phone calls yesterday, I’m gonna do six today.”

10:37Or, I tell people, if you didn’t do something, don’t leave it blank, put a zero in. ‘Cause we can turn a zero to a one overnight. It’s 100% increase.

10:50Right? And that’s one phone call or two phone calls. So it’s working with agents like that and just kind of tugging them along a little bit and giving them that, “You can do it if you want to.”

11:03And that’s-

11:04that’s the difference. Anybody can do it, but who really wants to do it? And that’s really where it comes down to.

Loida Velasquez11:11

Yeah. And who is willing to commit and be disciplined-

11:15in doing it long term.

Vance Mizzi11:16

Right. And that’s truly wanting. Everybody, quote-unquote, “wants to be successful”, but very few people are willing to put in what it takes to be successful.

Loida Velasquez11:26

Mm-hmm.

Vance Mizzi11:27

I just ran an ABR class in my office yesterday, which is Accredited Buyer Rep for NAR.

11:38We were talking with the instructor, and out of almost two million people licensed in the state of California, there’s like 25,000 that hold that designation.

11:51So it’s like, all right, so if you’re ever in an interview and somebody says, “What sets you apart from the others?” It’s, I took five minutes and put a little more into my education.

12:00A little bit goes a long way in this business. And getting back to your accountability, it’s what are you doing to make yourself different than everyone else?

12:13And that’s a big question for everybody.

Loida Velasquez12:15

Yes. And I think along with that also comes professionalism, which, I have seen so many different things doing real estate transactions.

12:23I’m sure you have as well. So what tips do you have when it comes to that? Or what specifically do you wanna touch on that maybe agents need to hear?

Vance Mizzi12:31

Well, we’re at the beach, okay? And this is a very strange area down here, in the matter that I’ll show up like this, dressed in practically a three-piece suit, and I’ll do business with a guy in board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops.

12:53I can dress like that too, but it doesn’t exude professionalism. And when we’re down here, when you’re dealing with multi-million dollar properties, most of the time you’re dealing with C-level executives. You’re dealing with people who get dressed when they go to work, and they might expect that same professionalism to show up when someone’s going to work for them.

13:17And that’s kinda what I express to my agents. We’re all individual. You can do business any way you want, but that professionalism is, would you do business with yourself? Would you hire yourself? And if you were your boss, would you give yourself a raise? And if you can answer yes to those three questions, you’re doing okay.

13:39But a lot of time most people go, “Well, I guess I’d tell myself to do this more or that more.” And you really need to understand where we’re coming from with that. And coming from Wall Street, if you walked in my office without a jacket on, I didn’t even hear you. Like literally, people would walk into my office without their jacket on and be talking to me, and it was literally like there was no sound.

14:08Until they went back to their office, got their jacket, and came back. Because the level of professionalism was, you walked around in a suit. That’s how we did business. And I kind of appreciate that. But in the same right, I wanna make sure I’m being realistic to today’s world, and I dress how I feel comfortable.

14:31And I hope people do the same.

Loida Velasquez14:34

Yeah. And I think for me, just on my experience, and what I also like to tell agents is that nowadays a lot of agents work from home, and I personally like to always be dressed up and ready to go, because if I set a listing appointment and that seller’s ready to go now, I can’t be in my pajamas.

14:52And I think a lot of agents sometimes do that, or they’re calling from their bed or things like that.

Vance Mizzi14:57

I challenge any agent, and I’ll put this out there to anybody listening to this. I challenge you to do your work in your pajamas and me in my office dressed for success, and you tell me who feels better about themself, who’s talking to people with more excitement, enthusiasm, assuredness of themselves.

15:27When I’m home, I’m worried about laundry, I’m worried about, what was that noise outside? Did I turn off the stove? Things like that. It’s constant. And I need to leave to go to work, but I can appreciate people who can work from home.

15:44I just question how effective you’re truly being if you’re not dressing the part.

Loida Velasquez15:50

Yeah, exactly. And from everything that you’re mentioning that you cover in your coaching, one of the things that I do wanna ask you is that right now we’re wrapping up February. Let’s say someone’s watching this, they feel like they’re falling behind, they wanna get back on track and still have a year where they kick butt.

16:09What are some things that they need to be looking at right now and maybe adjusting in case they haven’t done them correctly?

Vance Mizzi16:17

Number one, they need two sets of goals. They need their short-term and long-term goals. What would exemplify a successful year for them this year?

16:33And from that, they need to break it down into monthly, weekly, and daily activities. How am I gonna get there? And then track themselves. The beauty to this business, or really any sales business, is if you’re willing to put the effort in, you can get almost anything you want. And by simply taking a good hard look at what you’ve done… and here’s the thing, Loida.

16:58I would challenge anybody who’s in a position right now who says, “Yeah, I did everything I needed to and I’m not where I wanna be.” Because most people, when I’m talking to them like that, they tell me things like, “I made a bunch of phone calls. I worked really hard the past two months.” But when I ask them to really break down what they did on a daily basis-

17:20it kinda goes away. I was talking with an agent last night, and she told me, she says, “I called all week.” This is her first week in the business. “I called all week. I didn’t get anybody, but I’m gonna keep doing it for you.” I’m like, “For me?” I said, “Okay.” So I said, “What did you do?”

17:40And she’s hand dialing right now, just getting used to it. But she says two hours a day and 24 contacts. I said, “Wow, 24 contacts a day?” And she says, “No, no, in five days I spoke to 24 people.” I said, “Oh, okay, five people a day.” So I said, “We’re working on a 3% turnaround ratio, so right now with 25 people, you have a .7% chance of someone saying yes.

18:10You’re not even giving yourself an opportunity to win, so you gotta get your numbers up.” And what I would tell everybody in coaching, the most offensive thing a coach can say to a player is, “You have to work harder.” And the most offensive thing a player can hear from a coach is, “You have to work harder.”

18:33A coach is only effective when they can see what you’re doing and they can make changes and tweaks to it. “Okay, Loida, you called 25 people a day for the past 10 days. You spoke to 250 people, and nobody wants to do business with you. What are you saying?” Okay, that’s the coaching, right? If you come in, you say, “I spoke for two weeks, I called 10 people.”

19:01“You need to call more people.” And that becomes very, “Ugh, why did I even ask him that? I know I need to do that.” So it comes in where, let’s really look at what you’re doing, and is that effort coachable?

19:24Or do we still need to increase the effort to get it to a coachable level? I think that’s kind of where we look at it, and it’s really creating that accountability for the agent to understand that the only person they ever need to look at for success or failure is themselves. And sometimes that’s the hardest pill to swallow.

Loida Velasquez19:44

Yeah. And I think many times agents also know that they need to be doing a little more, but maybe they get discouraged or they start comparing themselves to someone else, or they just get lazy.

Vance Mizzi19:58

Everybody loves the blueprint when I issue it. Right? They all love it, and then once they gotta dig into it and really start filling it in and seeing how much work is involved, they all forget how to do it. And look, it wasn’t just this office, it was every company, any place I’ve ever worked, even back on Wall Street when I was training financial planners, it was the same thing.

20:25If they had the numbers, they knew how to fill them in, but if they didn’t or felt like it was too much, it became overwhelming. And that’s where we as coaches come in, and we have to take some of the overwhelm away and give people the, you know, the ABC gets you XYZ. This business is very simple.

20:46It’s just not easy. There’s just a few things we need to do every day consistently to be successful in the long run, and that’s what you need a coach for, to kind of look and see what you’re doing and say, “Stop right there. Let me show you a better way,” without making you wrong. It’s not a matter of making people wrong for doing it, but-

21:10let’s not waste time. One thing we don’t have in this world is time. We don’t have unlimited time, at least.

Loida Velasquez21:20

Exactly. So tell us, where can people go if they want to learn more about your coaching or signing up, or maybe having a chat with you to see if it makes sense for you guys?

Vance Mizzi21:31

They can always reach me on my Instagram handle, @themizzigroup.

21:34Or, I have two different websites. You can go to livingbetteryou.com, and that’s my coaching website. Or you can go to themizzigroup.com, which is my real estate website. Highly recommend going to Living Better You. That’s gonna bring you through all the different aspects of the business and really give you a good understanding of what is expected of you.

Loida Velasquez21:58

Awesome. Well, Vance, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us some of your knowledge. I think especially this last part is really something that agents really need to take note of and even rewatch, because, again, tracking your numbers, having a system like the one that you provide, at the end of the day I think it’s just almost like a habit where you plug in your numbers, and then over time you see what you need to work on, what needs improvement.

22:22And someone like you comes in and can help an agent go from average to maybe doubling or tripling their production just because they had someone like you guiding them.

Vance Mizzi22:32

Absolutely. Once you’re keeping score, and you’re kinda working to make tomorrow better than today, and you’re pushing things forward, it’s amazing how quickly your business will absolutely explode as opposed to trickle along hoping to get somewhere.

22:48And that’s what I want people to understand. Look, there is so much room to be successful in this business, and there’s so many agents right now leaving the industry. Now is the perfect storm for brand new agents and established agents to really kick it into high gear and take their career to the next level, because a lot of people are simply not doing it.

Loida Velasquez23:12

Exactly. There you go. All right, Vance. Well, thank you so much once again. And to everyone else, we’ll see you on the next one.

Vance Mizzi23:20

Thank you so much, Loida. We’ll see

23:21you soon.