What started as a platform for his wife’s real estate team in Utah expanded into a full-scale operating system for the real estate industry.
Brian Charlesworth, CEO and founder of Sisu, joins me on this episode of The Byron Lazine Podcast to discuss systems and tracking, predictions for the future of real estate, and accountability.
The Power of Systems
Brian has always been passionate about technology and making a difference in people’s efficiencies – that’s clear from his background which includes time at MCI, starting the first voice internet company, and franchising companies like HouseMaster Home Inspections.
But it wasn’t until he started helping his wife’s real estate team that he understood the true power of systems.
At the time, his wife’s Utah real estate team had five agents closing about 150 transactions a year.
Brian joined the operating side while simultaneously doing sales, working to help the team turn into a listing business.
Right away, he started noticing the pain points everyone experiences when tracking numbers: taking information from intake forms, spreadsheets, Google forms, and whiteboards, and putting them into Trello. All those different systems take valuable time for the Transaction Coordinator, and when you’re aiming to grow your business, that time quickly adds up.
By ensuring all agents were tracking their business, their production doubled. That’s when Brian realized he needed to take something to the market and created the real estate operating system Sisu.
If you put the right systems in place, what will happen is, you’ll find you can bring these agents in, you can teach them, you can help them build their business, you can scale…and it’s not any more work. In fact, it’s less work for you.
Once implemented, Sisu enabled his wife’s team to grow from 5 to 60 agents, on pace to do 1,000 transactions. All this, and the size of her admin team has decreased – from three Transaction Coordinators down to one, along with some VAs.
Empowering Your Team
Real estate is one of the few industries where there is a massive sharing of information, in large part because the top producers and biggest team leaders know it’s all about execution.
While Sisu helps agents track – and double – their sales business every year, it goes even deeper than that.
Many people who go from being a salesperson to starting a team don’t fully realize owning a team is a completely different business model. How do you make the switch to team leader?
Really, that’s what Sisu empowers people to do – is to become a great leader, managing a sales team the right way, managing an operations team, having visibility into all your data and making real-time decisions.
Future of ‘Teamrages’
I’m always curious to know what people think the future of real estate. So I asked Brian what’s ahead of us in the second half of 2022.
We feel like the future of real estate is teams.
Traditional brokerages run their business like a business, while ‘teamrages’ are both a team and a brokerage. This model is utilized by some of the most massive businesses, like DJ & Lindsey and Chinatti Realty. And more are following in that path.
Accountability
To wrap up, I asked Brian for a hack that every real estate professional should be implementing daily. His response was immediate: accountability.
You have to have daily accountability with your team. They have to report their numbers out every single morning. If you’re not getting activity from them every day…they’re gonna miss their goals.
We’re both big fans of accountability and exchanged some books on the topic worth checking out: Tribe of Millionaires and Extreme Ownership.
Brian’s final thoughts focused on how people navigate through changing markets.
I personally witnessed thousands of teams during COVID who doubled their business within…six months. And I also witnessed that those that stopped doing anything for their business dropped from 900 transactions down to about 100. So, which are are you going to be in this market?
Sisu increases brokerage & team annual volume by 107% and agent annual volume by 28%.
