Interview with Everold Reid (part 2/3)

Hey everybody, how you doing? Kelly Johnson here from the 4X Formula. Okay, so we’re going to get right into this. This is part two of the Everold Reid interview. Part one was fantastic! Lots of super awesome nuggets of wisdom there. In this part, I actually reveal the structure of the 4X Formula course as I’m chatting with Everold. Enjoy!

Kelly Johnston: It’s funny. You’re talking in fours. What I did in my training program, what I’ve done is I’ve broken up the four facets of what I believe a realtor needs to master to be what I call a 4X agent. And there’s a lot of 1X agents out there. There’s a lot of 2X agents out there. I was a 1 and 2X agent. I mean, I know. And so I knew where the failure was. I knew. I started to determine and then the light bulb came on. And so what I decided to do is I’m taking the course, I’m breaking it up into four parts.

Kelly Johnston: First part is what I’m calling attract. So that’s all about getting the business, getting the phone calls, figure out how to get listings, like all that kind of stuff. So that’s attract and there’s a whole pile of things in behind all of that. Including mindset, including how to speak to people properly, how to get into proper conversations, how to do an open house really well, how to lock in a buyer and sit down with them and set the stage on how the process is going to go. All of that kind of stuff is all in attract. And then there’s a team. So attract takes us right up to the listing appointment and the conversation to set up that appointment and do a really good job so you have a really good appointment.

Kelly Johnston: Attain is all about the appointments and sitting down with people and locking down that business. Attaining the business. Some people are really good at attracting it and they’ll pay tons of money to try to attrack business. You don’t have to pay a ton of money to attract business. You really don’t. All you’re doing is you’re setting up yourself to attract a bunch of strangers so that people call you up and they go, “Well obviously you can pull off something that someone else can. So now my expectation of you is totally unrealistic.” And so that’s what you’re attracting. So we’re changing what people are attracting in that.

Kelly Johnston: So next is serve. Serve really well. How do you serve really well? What kind of systems can you put in place? We have a bunch of tools that I’ve developed over 22 years in my business, almost 2000 deals that we know how to serve people well and you can even plug people in and create good systems for that and then retain. After that is the retention of the client.

So attract, attain, serve, retain. You get really good at serve and retain over time. Really good. You don’t even have to spend any time or money or anything on attract and attain. We did a lot of deals last year. I traveled a total of about 35 days last year we went camping. I don’t work 60, 70 hours a week. I don’t. I do work six days a week because that’s just what I do. I can’t help it. I actually love it. I take Sundays for the family, but in that kind of time frame, we’re able to produce way more than what most people produce and keep a lot more money.

Everold Reid: Of course.

Kelly Johnston: The dream business in my mind is that you can work. When you’re working your work. You work when you’re working, right. No downtime, no stand around with coffee cups telling war stories, you know?

Everold Reid: Yeah. That’s a big waste.

Kelly Johnston: Do your work. Get it done. Spend time… If you want to talk war stories, you want to have conversations with people, call your clients! Have conversations with them, learn more about them. Ask them how their family is, take that time to do that. That is an easy phone call to make. People that love you and you want to call them up. Do that. And they love you even more for doing that.

Everold Reid: Yeah. Those are the relationships that you won’t kill. They’ll stay with you forever.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah! The realtors in the office who aren’t doing anything because they got lots of time to chat with you. They’re not making you any money at all. They’re not doing any good.

Everold Reid: Yeah! They’re not making themselves any money or you. That’s true.

Kelly Johnston: Now our business. I did the numbers cause I do the numbers every year. I figured out where my business is coming from. I figured out what my average dollar per deal is and so then I can start to use that for my next goal setting for the next year. And when I sit down with it, I was going, where’s the business coming from? I write it all down and keep records of it all because you can’t change what you don’t measure. If you don’t keep track of things or aren’t diligent in that way. And it’s not a lot of time it’s just being diligent. But sometimes it’s just about having the systems or just having the ways to do it so we provide that for people. So that they have a way that they can record things. And then the systems that we teach are easy to do. I found that with people that I’ve trained or worked with, if I can make it easy for them to implement, then they’ll implement it. They’ll actually create a new habit if I can make it easy for them to do it.

Kelly Johnston: But if they also see the value in it and what the results will be, if they do do it, it makes it a lot easier to set goals when you know your numbers.

Everold Reid: Yeah, the numbers are huge. And one of the things I teach in my courses and there’s actually a partial cut away up the spreadsheet in the book is how I track and monitor my goals. Actively, every day while I’m selling cars and I also track and project my annual income. So no one, not a single salesperson that I’ve talked to in the stores that I’ve been to, I would say, okay, what are your goals for the year? And they’d say, “Well, my goal is to sell as many cars or as many homes as I can.”

Kelly Johnston: Yeah.

Everold Reid: Well, but that’s not a goal. And how do you track that goal? How do you monitor if you’re behind are ahead? So these are things. I have these spreadsheets that looked like a financial statement, that has helped me to grow exponentially every year. And if you’re falling behind, you know immediately. If you look at the projection for your annual income and you know you’re behind the average, it’ll tell you right away that you’re projecting less than what your goal is. So that’s how you monitor. Those are important. And going back to what you were saying about the clients, looking after clients, people will, from a loyalty perspective, because here’s why you’re trying to create loyalty by shifting the consumers or the client’s thinking.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah.

Everold Reid: You’re shifting your own mindset. You’re approaching things from a different mindset because you’re solving someone’s problem before they even have a problem. They then get used to the habit of not having any issues to deal with. I mean, you take care of their housing needs. Me taking care of their car needs. You saying “Okay” and being honest sometime in saying, “Okay, well this may not be the right time. Or this may not be the right house for you. Or wait another month or two.” And that’s what the clients like. They liked the fact that they know I’ll call when the time is right and they don’t have to worry about it.

Kelly Johnston: Just the other day I had a lady, we sold a commercial building for her. She owned it for about 20 years and she made some good money on it and she wanted to help her son get into business. He had a truck accident and got some brain damage. And in that, what happened was, his credit got tarnished. And the lady he ended up with, she had a little blip in her past too. And so, you know, and this is the thing, these are people.

Everold Reid: These are real people.

Kelly Johnston: Life happens.

Everold Reid: It’s real circumstances.

Kelly Johnston: But they’re kind of embarrassed about it. Right. And they don’t want to talk about it. But if I can get into that trust circle with them where they all of a sudden looked to me like an advocate. First of all, I should word this differently. If they don’t think of me as an advocate or somebody that’s in their trust, they’re not going to share that stuff with me. And this is where the frustration occurs and all of a sudden you’ve gone a month and a half down a process with some people and then you find all this stuff up.

Everold Reid: Yeah. You don’t know what the real problem was in the first place.

Kelly Johnston: And now what happens? The salesman or the person who is not their advocate properly, who’s thinking, “I’m going to sell these people a house”, all of a sudden runs into a situation where he goes, “I can’t sell this person a house because they have all this crap. Jerks! Why didn’t they tell me? Buyers are liars.” You ever heard salesman say that?

Everold Reid: Yeah, absolutely! You didn’t ask the right question in the first place.

Kelly Johnston: That’s your own fault.

Everold Reid: 100%

Kelly Johnston: Right? So I got in these conversations. I said, “Okay, it’s going to be a little tough. Here are some of the challenges we’re going to run into, but you know what? We’re going to work through it.” Now we’re honest. We’re working through it. I understand the challenge. They shared it with me. They felt comfortable to share it with me. I’m going “Great, don’t worry. Hey Man, hey, I’ve been there. I’ve had blips in my life happened too! It’s all good. But you know what? Let’s get you through it.” At the end of the day, we found that they’re not able to buy today and I said to his mother, who was first my client, I said, “I want to make sure we don’t leave them on the street scratching their head wondering what to do. Six months from today, I don’t want them to be in the same position. Let’s walk alongside them. Let’s put them on a plan. Let’s get them so that in three to six months, they’re in a different position so they’re able to get into the market. It’s important. This is a first home we need to get them. This is how wealth is built, so we need to help these people do that.”

Kelly Johnston: And she’s like, “Kelly, I have never had anybody telling me that!”

Everold Reid: You know, this is something. And that very line, “I’ve never had anyone to tell me that”, or “No one’s told us that before.” This is what I get almost every single day when I talked to a new client. Because most of the clients I deal with are existing clients. So now they know the system. They know my thinking. They don’t have to come into the store two or three times to buy a car. They come in and usually once and that’s to pick up their new car. Okay?

Kelly Johnston: Yeah.

Everold Reid: But the new clients, including this week, I sold nine vehicles this week in three days.

Kelly Johnston: Wow.

Everold Reid: Without fail the first time clients would always say to me, “Nobody told us, you know, we can do it this way” or “We’ve never being informed about this before” because there’s so many different ways and as part of what I’m going to be delivering tomorrow at at my workshop is… People out there… Okay. Most salespeople like you know, are going for the quick sale. It’s how much you want to pay. It’s discounts, it’s how much you can get for less. It’s when can we do it? How much can you pay? So the thing that’s missing is advice. You are going to give advice, you’re going to consult, you’re going to ask questions. You’re going to listen. Big thing is salespeople don’t listen.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah.

Everold Reid: And even when the clients are talking, you’re not hearing because you’re actually not listening and you’re thinking way ahead too much about selling. Which they’ll quickly figure you out because…

Kelly Johnston: It won’t take long.

Everold Reid: Yeah. It won’t take long. And then you’ll realize why they won’t call you back. Because if they run into a guy like myself or Kelly, you’re not going to sell. Bottom line. We are going to sell because we’re going to create solutions. We’re going to solve their problems. It’s the advice. So there are multiple ways to lease a vehicle, to buy a vehicle. So clients will come into us and say “We want to buy cash.” You know, in our demographic, Oakville, Ontario, tons of people, multimillionnaires are everywhere so they can buy the dealerships… Some of them if they want to. Literally! And they’ll come in and say, “We want to buy cash.” How were you thinking? “Well we’re going to buy cash. You know, we don’t lease, we have the money.” And they think automatically that that’s the best deal. Because people are, you know, from the old days in the eighties and the nineties even early two thousands, if you had a cash and you are going to buy a house, you’re going to buy a car…

Kelly Johnston: Yes.

Everold Reid: You know, it’s the best way to buy it because you’re going to get the best price and the best price means it’s the best deal. But today, it actually doesn’t mean it’s the best deal anymore. Or it’s the best way to acquire a vehicle or a lot of products. Why put 60,000 or 100,000 if you own money into a car. That’s dumb in my opinion to begin with, into such a depreciating asset. There’s very little protection. So once you talk to clients about the protection or the liability issues or how we can finance their car at zero or 1% while they keep their money and make more than 1% or 2% and they’ll say, “Well, nobody structured it like that before.” All of a sudden you become a trusted advisor.

Kelly Johnston: Exactly! You just elevated yourself in their eyes.

Everold Reid: Because I’m saying to you, and I say these verbatim, I’ve said, “I can do this quickly. I can take your money in 20 minutes and this deal will be done. Okay? But it’s not the best way for you to acquire this vehicle.” And they’ll say, “Okay?” Now all of a sudden I’m teaching.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. And they’re in a position of, “Okay, I’m listening. Tell me more.”

Everold Reid: Exactly. And that’s the difference. Once you can say that to a client, “Okay, I understand you’d like to pay cash or understand you’d like this product or that service.” And you’d say, “Okay, well he may not be the right product or service for you, but let me give you some advice and here’s why.” They’ll listen to you and you’ve earned trust there, unlike any other person.

Kelly Johnston: Yes. You know, it’s funny. We have this thing to overcome and it’s that salesman stigma, right? We both have it from the car salesman world to the real estate world. I actually did some studying the other day and the realtor evolved after the homestead act was passed in the United States. Canada had a very similar thing. I just don’t know what it was, but the homestead was in 1862 and they just started giving land away and then the industrial revolution started kicking in and then people started to centralize and then they started to have areas where people could start to buy. And then the banks got smart and the bank started going, “Oh, well we can lend to like regular people.” The bank isn’t just a place for rich people who keep their money in anymore, right? All of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, we could land and we can make money from that and these people are working in jobs, these industrial jobs, so they have an ability to pay it back.”

Kelly Johnston: So now the average person could start to buy houses and homes and they start break up land and sell it and stuff. And so the evolution of that, but the first realtor wasn’t a realtor yet. He was a guy who had a listing, right? So he had this top hat and in his top hat he had a list. So he would go talk to people and he’d say, okay, so how much would you like? Would it be cool if you’ve got $2,000 for your land? And they would go $2,000 from my land. That’d be amazing. So then he’d put that in his hat. “Okay, they want two grant, they’ll agree to two grand. Perfect.” So then he’d go talk to, “Hey, are you looking to buy some land over there? There’s some land right over there and they, you know, they’ll take three grand. How do you feel about that? Three grand?” “Well maybe 2,800.” “You know what I think and maybe I can convince him of that.”

Everold Reid: Wow!

Kelly Johnston: So he would make a bump and that’s now illegal by the way! (laughing) You can’t do that anymore. But that’s how it all started. So that’s what listings, that’s the word listings came from, right. He had a list! And there was no laws, there was nothing governing that idea.

Everold Reid: It had to start somewhere. (laughing)

Kelly Johnston: But imagine the trust factor, right? So now the word gets out, right? The word gets out. So who’s this guy? He’s running around snickering. Going I just duped a bunch of people out of money and the two parties on each side ore going “I just got duped.” So that’s where realtors started from, and then the word “realtor” didn’t get coins. Like when the National Association of Realtors got together on 1916. But at that point it was all about selling, all about selling, all about selling. So they were salesmen. Because we kept all the information. Just up until recently, when I got licensed in 97, we had the green book. We had all the information. We weren’t allowed to give that book out to anybody. We had the information, it was horrible. It was black and white, little tiny little pictures with no information, no Internet yet by the way, I don’t know listeners if you’ve ever heard of this, but there was a time when there was no internet.

Everold Reid: It’s not that long ago!

Kelly Johnston: There was time. No Internet! And you couldn’t just pop in. But now the people can get the information, video tours, and we do 3D tours and all this stuff. Now there’s so much information. But now those same people need an advocate. They need someone that they can trust. I’m not going to sell anybody a house, right? And they’re not going to buy a house that I talk them into. That is not going to happen. My job is to elevate myself in the eyes of the consumer as their advocate, right? They need to hear that I’m there for them. When I say things to a buyer that I’ve just got to know however that’s happened, but I get to know him or we get into a conversation and I’ll say things like, “You know what? We need to make sure you make a really good decision because real estate is the best way for people to build wealth in their life. It’s the other way, right?” They work really hard to make their money but real estate is one of the most common ways that people actually go wealth. And so I want to make sure that, at least get you started in that. That we don’t make a bad decision. As best we can, we’re going to make sure you look at enough stuff. There may be houses out there you think I don’t want to look at, but you know what, think of it as research. So I have no expectation in the beginning other then, we’re doing research, right? You’re filling your brain with what you believe to be true.

Everold Reid: That’s so comforting!

Kelly Johnston: Yes! So now the guard goes down, “Okay, this person is in my corner. They’re not trying to arm wrestle me into a deal first House they show me.” Right? They understand like “This guy, he wants to make sure I make a good decision” and then we’re going to negotiate well for him and we’re going to use, you know, good information to try and make sure they pay a fair price. But just hearing those words, and I think at the end of the day, if we need to get good at anything and it has to be authentic, it has to be real, and you have to really get into that mindset of out flowing.

Everold Reid: Yeah.

Kelly Johnston: If you’re thinking outwardly and really thinking about how to help that person really, really, really well and ways to do that and ways to communicate that, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to build trust. The foundation to all relationship is trust. It’s the first thing. It’s not the last thing. It’s not developed later. It’s the first thing. Trust is the first.

Everold Reid: Yeah. And you know what happens. It’s just an uphill battle if, especially the buyers or clients don’t trust you in the first place.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. And even if something happens, like things happen in deals, let’s face it, things happen, right? Maybe someone drives off a lot and I don’t know, I don’t think it had ever happened with a Lexus, but if something happened, not your fault, but you drive off that lot and the transmission falls out of the…. (laughing) Totally not your fault. You did nothing to make that happen. But what happens to trust, all of the things that you just said about that Lexus vehicle is… You’ll never be able to talk to that person ever again. And it’s totally not your fault.

Everold Reid: Yeah.

Kelly Johnston: Trust is killed. As soon as trust is betrayed, it kills a relationship.

Everold Reid: And very few of those relationships you’re able to rekindle. It’s just very, very difficult. I’ve had a few of those, both ways. You know, and we all learn. And sometimes it’s because you didn’t take the time to understand people. I had this happen to me, you know, with one of my auto clients. And even though it wasn’t my fault and it was a communication issue, it almost doesn’t matter. And it’s so hard to then go back and say, “Wow, we didn’t communicate properly, even though your intentions were totally different.”

Kelly Johnston: Totally.

Everold Reid: Yeah. But one of the things that has led me to the success that I’ve had in the automobile space is the fact that I dared to be different. Okay? So absolutely be different. Like I covered it before, be a people person, listen to clients well. Solve their problems for them so that they don’t have to spend days and weeks doing it. And when I was on the road, contrast that to when I was on the road selling ads and doing my marketing and advertising business when I would travel to, you know, Iowa, you know, Florida, West Virginia, North Carolina. I mean, I’ve been to 41 states, folks and 8 provinces. Many times to many of those places. And the question I’ve always ask myself is when you have half an hour or 20 minutes to see a client who’s buying advertising something that nobody wants to pay for and back in the day was print advertising. And they still paid for it and it was expensive. And you had 20 minutes to do it and half. And you were able to still sell that person. I left asking myself why. I’d asked myself why several times. And that’s what led me to create the sales success that I’ve had and to write the book because I realized, as the book says when it starts, my goal was to answer the how and why questions of sales.

Kelly Johnston: Yes.

Everold Reid: Because almost anybody can sell a product or service in exchange for money, but it’s how and it’s why. Why does it matter or what’s the right way? How does it benefit the client, et cetera. So those are the things. It’s more the psychological aspect of it rather than just the contractual aspect.

Kelly Johnston: Well, this is an exciting time in our lives my friend. You have this awesome book, The Reid Method and I got an autograph copie, so I’m really excited about that. People need to read that book. And not just car salespeople.

Everold Reid: No. The book was written not for automobile salesperson. It was written with stories and examples from my automobile sales career and my advertising sales career. Okay? So the fact that I was able to travel North America and parts of the Caribbean and to sell advertising, I took a lot away from that. That was for eight years. The fact that I spent about 21 years at the time in automobile sales and marketing and management. So not just from a salesperson, but from a dealership owner, a used car dealership owner, from a senior executive management at Lexus and at Toyota, managing stores. I give the prospective of success from different levels, some ownership to sales, to management, to travel. Okay? To dealing with clients in different markets and that’s the other huge takeaway. Huge lesson I learned was in traveling in different countries, selling the same product to different people from different cultures, communities, barrieres, demographics, economic climates, different cities have different issues. And the fact that I was able to take money and to win sales and to win customers from 41 states in hundreds of cities and then to have a lot of these clients and real estate agencies such as yourself helped me to start my own company because we were able to build up accounts and trust. Because you’re there with great service. People would know where to find you. You would answer the phone, you would return the phone calls, good or bad. That’s how you build, you know? So it’s a work in progress, but a couple more books on the way.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. That’s awesome. I’ve started with my ebook, which I think has some valuable information in there. I haven’t launched anything yet. So we’re still new at the time of this recording. I’m actually in the middle of rewriting it because I’ve created a little bit of a more organized way of putting the information across now. So I’m really excited about that. But it’s down the road a little bit.

Everold Reid: I think one of my biggest testaments to the book was from an eighth grader. It was an email that was totally unexpected. I did not recognize who this person was at all, I’ve never met her. But a young lady, two years ago, sent me an email when she was in grade 7. I was doing a book signing at one of the bookstores and her parents bought a copy of my book. They took it home and she started reading the book and she sent me an email to say, “My parents bought this book and I just started, you know, I skim through it a little bit…”

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. It’s a 12 year old girl.

Everold Reid: Yeah! “…and I’ll get back to you and I’ll let you know what I think.” The first episode. And then a year later, the email comes again and she goes, “You remember me? I’m in eighth grade now.” And she goes, “I can’t believe I’m saying this but growing up, my parents and I thought I would become like a lawyer or a doctor or something. And I was actually thinking of going into medicine and the gist of the email was, I can’t believe that I’m actually considering going into sales after reading your book.”

Kelly Johnston: Wow! The fact that she’s even thinking about career…

Everold Reid: Yeah! And read the book! Crazy

Kelly Johnston: Hey! I hope you enjoyed that last episode. Here’s the reality that you may or you may not know. The top 20% of real estate agents take home 80% of the money out there. While the bottom 80% are fighting over 20% of the scraps that are left. Do you have a desire to be on the top 20%? If you’re working hard and not sustainably making 6 figures of income and beyond, the problem is not you. It’s your system.

I struggled for years until one day the light bulb came on and I figured out how to simplify the real estate business. If you want to learn my secrets, that anyone can implement immediately, that I still use everyday, that pays me multiple 6 figures every year, go to 4xformula.com right now.