Nathan Daniel: 0:02
Welcome to Episode 24, of the broker-to-broker real estate podcast. I'm really excited today because we are headed all the way to Fort Worth, Texas. And we are going to be visiting with Chandler Crouch and he's going to be talking to us about why customer service always comes first. So if you're ready, here we go. Welcome to the broker-broker real estate podcast where we have real raw conversations with industry leaders, finding out how to connect, support, lead, and ultimately make an impact and drive results in the lives of your agents. I'm your host, Nathan Daniel, and welcome to the show. All right, all the way from Fort Worth, Texas. Chandler, welcome to the show.

Chandler Crouch: 0:44
Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.

Nathan Daniel: 0:47
Yeah, I'm excited to have you here too. I know. We've been kind of going back and forth. There were some vacations and some other stuff happening. But I'm excited that you're here. And I appreciate you coming to the show today.

Chandler Crouch: 0:59
Absolutely. Thank you so much. I think this podcast is great. There aren't enough brokers out there talking to help each other out. The pie is big enough for all of us. And I know I need all the help I can get. So I hope somebody can get something out of this.

Nathan Daniel: 1:13
That's right. So tune in everybody tune in, listen up, share it with somebody, share it with another broker because I love what you said there, the pie is big enough. Well, channel and let's jump in. I want to know all about you and your company. And you know what y'all do? So tell me about that.

Chandler Crouch: 1:28
Sounds good? Well, I have been in the real estate business for 20 years, I started out because I wanted to be an investor, I have tried a number of different things I was buying and selling houses. And then I've put on my loan officer hat for a little while. And anyway, one thing led to another in about 2015, I started really focusing on building what we have today, which is building the brokerage company, I have been independent from day one, I got my broker's license, and didn't really start using it to bring on real estate agents or to build a team until about 2015. And so now I've got a team of about 15 agents, a handful of support staff, and I run the brokerage company like what most people think of as a team. Because I think that's how it should be. That's a lot of love and involvement from the leader and just making sure they keep quality high and that sort of thing. And I could go on and on and on. But I've got three kids and a wife and I really like Mexican food, whatever you do.

Nathan Daniel: 1:31
Well, hey, you know, you got some great Mexican food down there in Fort Worth, I got family that lives down there. So well okay, so I want to go back because you said when we were talking originally, I know you said you spent some time as an investor. So can we start there?

Chandler Crouch: 2:53
Sure. Yeah.

Nathan Daniel: 2:54
So tell me about that experience. Now, you were a full-time investor.

Chandler Crouch: 2:59
Yes. Yeah.

Nathan Daniel: 3:02
So you flipped like you flipped houses, did you buy and hold? How many doors did you build up to?

Chandler Crouch: 3:08
Those are all great questions. So whenever I started, I started really dumb. I didn't know what the word mortgage meant, really. And I was completely broke. And this is back before the internet really kicked off back in 2002, sound really old now. But, you know, they're all these infomercials we're about with these real estate investor gurus, that we teach you how to buy houses without using any of your own money. And you could get cashback at the closing and all these things that just sounded really attractive and I thought, you know, I want to do that. So I tried just about every technique that I learned about in any real estate investor class or anything that any guru was doing. I was dumb enough and had nothing to lose, I just like it, and I was really eager. So I was like, I'm just gonna try it. So I've tried a number of things. And you know, from short sales and owner finance, wrap mortgages, subject to lease options, I mean, just you name it, and I tried it. Everything except buying a house off the courthouse steps. I showed up with money in my pocket, and it just didn't happen for me. But anyway, after doing all of that, a number of different exit strategies I did long-term hold, and rent, and I did the kind of delayed flip, which would be like a two-year hold and sell. I did immediate flips, and also everything in between held some notes for owner financing. What I learned, after all, that is number one, you have to buy low and sell high and it doesn't matter what cute little technique you're using that fundamental doesn't change and there's no such thing as a no-risk transaction. I could go on and on about that because that's the way they're promoted, but it's not the reality. And the second thing is that whenever I started out, I was completely broke. And I do actually care about making sure I'm not losing someone else's money. So I might use be using someone else's credit or as kind of like a partnership, or I might have an investor that invested money. And I just, for me, even though my credit, my money wasn't on the line, I kind of I held it to a higher regard than maybe if it was my own. And so whenever you operate that way, I just was not willing to move as fast as I probably should have to make it really work. Because I didn't want to mess up. So anyway, the long story short, it's a lot better if you have some money to start than if you're investing, it helps to have some money. And so I decided to just focus on being a realtor so that it's more you know, I'm not having to invest so much to get a massive return on my money. And so the more and more I focused on that, I just think that it's an easier model to duplicate and replicate and multiply in and scale up. And so that's, what's got all my attention right now.

Nathan Daniel: 5:58
Okay, so well, thank you for that. So two lessons, I heard from your investor days, buy low and sell high and have a little bit of cash on hand. I love those two lessons. And so now, fast forward, like you're making that decision, you know what I'm going to take the traditional brokerage route. I'm going to start a real independent real estate firm, and I'm going to build it as a team. And so when we were initially talking, you said something that kind of that struck at me and it was customers come first. So can you talk to me about what you mean by customers come first? And because that's ingrained in your mission, right?

Chandler Crouch: 6:37
Yep, that's it. Yeah, the only reason why I'm doing what I'm doing, as opposed to something else, is I'll be an entrepreneur on one level or another. But the reason why I'm focused on the area that I'm in is because I want to make a difference. I think that if I just wanted to make money, there are probably other things out there, that might get my focus. Because if you just look at the environment, you have the there are brokers out there that are sponsoring agents at these insane splits or flat fee type brokers where you know, it's a 90/10 split, or there's a small transaction fee. And I can't, I'm not going to be able to compete on that level, unless I have a ton of agents, well, to get a ton of agents, I have to be willing to accept just about anybody, and then when I accepting any agent to come on board, then those are going to be the worst agents, the rookie agents, or I could go after a hiring crowd, but then I'd have to provide more resources. And anyway, what it's like, I either have to be willing for those agents to deliver horrible results to clients, or I have to train the agents. And if I'm going to train the agents, then I have to either charge them extra for training, or I need to increase commission splits. And so I just thought, well, if I want to be like everybody else, then I'll charge a low flat fee, I'll charge extra for training, and then nobody will want to take the training. And I'll be like every other brokerage company out there, and I just thought, I'm not okay with that. And I'm not okay with clients and getting the raw end of a deal while we're going through this learning curve. So I just decided to reform the whole process and just take a more active role and make sure that the compensation structure was ingrained in our business model, so that I could afford to invest fully in the training, and really passionately help real estate agents go from, not knowing anything about real estate to being expert level, and then our clients will win if I do that. And so the whole value set of how I was focusing on real estate changed, it was looking at the value proposition that I bring to the marketplace, it's really a client first proposition, which is just like every other business that I've ever gone to and appreciated, you know. You have all these, everybody's always thinking, what does the client want, what's in it for them. Instead of just focusing on recruiting agents and trying to make that the value proposition and not really caring about the client, I just decided, well, if we do what clients really want, and we deliver A-level service with A-level results, then that's what realtors want. So I can put the client first kind of forget about the realtor, get the business to show up, and then that's gonna be it as long as the realtor and I are in line with wanting the best for the client, then the realtor is gonna love working here as well. And that kind of help shape the culture and I could just go on and on forever about it. But yeah, that's it.

Nathan Daniel: 9:55
Well, I love that and I heard two things and I want to kind of go deeper on two of these points real quick, one is the client first model. I heard what you said there so I want to spend a little bit of time talking about that. But then I also want to hear how are you making sure that you're training your agents and leading your agents to live that client first model as well. So let's start first with the client first model, like how have you set yourself up to be that client first experience in your market?

Chandler Crouch: 10:28
The client, First. Well, first of all, my company is a reflection of what I'm willing to tolerate. So it's not the easiest thing for me to go out there and find awesome agents just at will. I can increase the odds, I'm going to find an awesome agent. But I can definitely make sure that if an agent isn't awesome, I can say bye to them, and not keep them under the same roof, so that's the first thing. The second thing is just being really involved, so I personally trained all of our agents. And, I really care about the agent's success, and I care about the client's experience. And so, how do I do it, number one was creating a compensation structure that justifies me spinning that amount of time into the agent's lives, and creating a situation where they can afford to come on board, and I'm not charging them an arm and a leg upfront. But I can go into that in detail. But I know we're going to kind of leave numbers out of this, and I'm okay with that. But, that's the first thing then it's just training them from square one. And then there's no shortcut, I'm just involved in the transactions in the beginning, until I can see a track record where they can stand on their own two feet, if somebody is not cutting it, or they're just, that is somebody's not cutting it, then I say bye to them. And we keep the good guys and you know there's no other way around it.

Nathan Daniel: 11:04
I like it. So high standards on who you hire and then holding them accountable to that client experience. And so as a company and one thing and you know if you're okay if I talk about this, one thing that I've seen you do for the community is in Texas, you have the ability to negotiate your like property taxes, right. So as a part of your experience, and you offer this service to all of your agents in their clients, right? You offer that service of going in and actually fighting to lower tax rates. Talk about that. When did that start?

Chandler Crouch: 12:37
Yep, you got it. So you mentioned something earlier about customer service, and just how, that shapes our focus. And really, it does come from the value standpoint that we just touched on. And I just wanted to mention this little mantra, this is one thing that creates the marketing focus. And that's what we're getting to now is the marketing focus is that I believe that our brand and our marketing is our client's experience. So our brand is our client's experience. It's not a set of colors or a set of logos. That's all stuff that kind of plays into it but it's a very, fairly minimal part. I don't know if you ever heard the saying that people may or may not remember, I don't know may not remember much about what you said, but they're gonna remember how you made them feel or something like that. So from the marketing side, it didn't make sense for us to just keep sending out postcards and filling up people's mailboxes, and spending 1000s of dollars to do that. Although I could justify doing that, because I can measure a rate of return on that it's very tangible and very easy to measure the rate of return, so I can justify a huge spend. But instead, I just said, you know what, I've created the training program and all sorts of other things in our company to align with these values. What if we re-engineered the marketing to align with those values as well. And so we kind of took a gamble and decided we were just going to look for ways to serve our local community and to become a valuable part of the community. I've read a couple of books, Gary Vaynerchuk kind of preaches about this in the "Thank You Economy" in the book, "Crush It", just it kind of lives with my spiritual values as well, just giving first and walking in faith kind of thing. So that's what we did. We were looking for opportunities to give people the property taxes here are insane. And the whole property tax system here in Texas is just nuts. They allow homeowners to protest their property taxes. And so we started out by just answering questions and providing information so that people could go out and protest their own property taxes. And then one thing led to another and it just made more sense to take the work on and actually represent our clients in protesting their property taxes and we decided to do it for free, just as a way of giving and serving. And then you know that everybody needs help, and nobody understands the system. So it just took off like crazy. And we started that five years ago and this year in Tarrant County, we've narrowed the focus to only Tarrant County, that might change next year. But in Tarrant County now, we protest more than anybody else, I represent more people than anybody else. And we had like, 22,000 folks that we helped. But wow.

Nathan Daniel: 15:26
Wow, that's a lot. You gotta have your systems in place to make that happen. Because it's in a given period of time, right, like a month or something that you have to do it?

Chandler Crouch: 15:34
Yeah, it's a very limited period of time, we have all 14,000 people signed up this year, within 30 days, and I'm talking about it, it's just really been really insane experience to go from zero to that in five years, but.

Nathan Daniel: 15:50
Well, that's cool. And that's an awesome service that you're providing to the community. I mean, you're helping people save, I imagine 1000s of dollars, on their taxes and stuff. And of course, they're going to think of you and your agents whenever that happens. So well, thank you for sharing that, I think that's a phenomenal service. Now, I want to talk about your agent training, like when you're bringing them on board. And how do you set that expectation upfront that a client comes first? How do you set that expectation with your agents?

Chandler Crouch: 16:18
Well, it's one of those things that I could talk about, or I could just kind of be it and show it and do it. And so, certainly, the very first conversation that I have, with an agent, I bring out this slide that shows our mission, vision, and core values in very very simple terms, it just says, on one side, it says kind of on the mission part, it says clients, just number one, clients, number two, agents, and or team. And then for vision, it just says this location, a few different locations, and then makes an industry-wide impact. And that and I don't have, I just got so burnt out and trying to make these snazzy mission statements or whatever, that's what I had. And then on the right side have a picture of Jesus. And it says, underneath it, it says Jesus is my homeboy. And it's just a funny way for me to let people know that, you know, I it's not, I'm not trying to shove religion down anybody's throat. But whenever you're starting out in, business, and for sure, being a real estate agent, when you get in and you think you're gonna get rich and have these mega success and month one, but then you get to month three. And if you've been going hard at it for a while, and you've spent all the time to get licensed you spent on time to go through training and you've been making a bunch of calls, and you just don't have any deals closing or you have deals that are getting under contract and have fallen apart. It's a very difficult learning curve. And theirs is much, I put the ages through six weeks of training and as much training as we do. There are still some intangible things you can't teach. And so when you reach depths of those moments, there are dark days where you think about quitting, and you really get in tune with who you are as a person, and why you're doing what you're doing. And I just tell people to look, I don't care what you believe, we have to share certain common values, but I don't care what religion you are, if you have a religion at all, you just have to be able to put up with me talking about my religion every now and then. Because that's how I make sense of the world and that's how I process these dark times. And I can talk about it without using the word "Jesus". But if I'm going, to be honest, that's really how I think about it in my own head. And so when you lead with that kind of thing, right up front, and it's real, and they see I'm not trying to be perfect, I'm actually a pretty screwed up guy. And I, you know, I need it just to keep me out of the gutter more than anything. And maybe that makes me weak, but I don't care, that's just the way I'm wired. And I lead with that with honesty, then it's just one of those things where, I'm not flirting with girls and doing things, I'm maintaining professionalism, then they see that that just creates a culture where people get it, we all want to succeed. But most agents really, truly want to help people and, you know, if we're all out there aligned in the same thing, then it really works well and that, it takes care of a lot of the stuff. So I don't have to preach about it. We're just doing it. That's a long answer, but well.

Nathan Daniel: 19:27
Well no, and I love that. I mean, I've heard a couple of different things. And first and foremost, I love how simple you actually keep your mission and vision and everything. I do think sometimes we tend to overcomplicate it and put too many fancy words into it. But you know, I think having clients and then a team, I think that's great. And then you said something else and it's funny, I was actually watching a video on YouTube this morning and it was short and it was talking about coaches and it was asking the difference between, like a coach and a trainer. And it was talking about a coach, does your coach actually show you what to do by doing it first? and then, letting you follow behind them? Or are they a trainer where they're directing the conversation and saying, "Okay, you do this, jump over these things, run these cones and all this stuff". And, what I heard you say is that you live it first. And then you let them experience you, and your authentic self an unapologetic way, right? And just allow you to be yourself and they will follow, right? They will follow in your footsteps.

Chandler Crouch: 20:28
Absolutely, yeah. And I think it's really important to do that for a number of reasons. Number one, when they see that there's no judgment and that like, you know, I'm gonna hop in there, and I'm gonna make mistakes and follow my face, then they can see that you can be very successful without having to be perfect. And I think, you know, fear is the number one issue that people have starting out, and that causes agents to fail, it manifests in different ways. For me, it manifests in distraction, I used to think that having attention deficit disorder was my biggest problem. And so I started realizing that, you know what, I'm able to maintain pretty darn good focus. In fact, sometimes unbelievable focus, until I get into an area that I'm uncomfortable with, and I'm challenged with, and then since I have 300,000, things to do, it's really easy for me to justify skipping around and doing two or three other things, and then reflect on that, realize it's just me being uncomfortable, and I just need to, slap myself in the face as I put my nose down and get it done. Well, other people, it'll manifest in laziness, they'll just recoil a little bit and not, do the things and take action as quickly as they need to. And it's just because they're uncomfortable. So when they see somebody walk through that it helps. Yeah, I'm gonna change it for just one second on something a little bit.

Nathan Daniel: 20:30
Yeah.

Chandler Crouch: 21:50
I feel like it's difficult to be a realtor and be a broker, at the same time. And I say that I shouldn't throw around the jargon. It's difficult to be a real estate agent selling houses representing people and also be a broker at the same time. And so for me, I've chosen to be a broker and to maintain that coaching aspect. And so whenever I'm doing it with them, I'm like, "No, you're gonna go to the listing appointment". And if you need help, I'm here to help and we can roleplay, we can do this in the office all day long. But I don't want to do a forum and I, that I keep the broker hat on in the coach hat. And if I get a lead that comes in the door, I don't scrape the cream off the top, I hand it straight over to the agents just because that's the way I feel like the organizational structure is best suited so that I can do this really, really well. And they can do that really well. And it works together really well.

Nathan Daniel: 22:44
Okay so yeah, and I think, you hit on a topic that's very touchy. I mean, I think there's so many that are, let's just say "Competing brokers" and "Non-Competing brokers" and, everybody gets to make their own choice on what that looks like. And I think you're right though, it is tough. Like, because even only on the broker side, if you're not even in production, there's so many hats that we have to wear constantly, right? Like, we're in sales, we're in training, we're in coaching or mentoring, we're in legal compliance, we're in all sorts of different positions. And then if you also tack on that production side of it as well, it can be tough, right? You're juggling, you know, two main things. So I commend you for standing up and be like, "You know what, I am going to be the leader and not be in production", but you're pouring into your people, and teaching them how to be great customer service agents, right?

Chandler Crouch: 23:34
Yep. It was difficult at first, it was a pay cut, for sure. In fact, it's probably still a pay cut in some ways, I could probably make more but I read some entree leadership is, "The E-Myth revisited". And there are a couple of the books that are just like that, and you're either working on your business or working in your business. And that was the quickest ticket to start working on the business and to be able to multiply. And it just made sense, and it also kept my marriage together. You try to do too many things and realize, you know you got to let go of something and just really focused, and I kind of, jump back to the first subject we went into. One of the things I realized was if I'm trying to do a whole lot of everything, then I end up not going very deep. And so I've just done everything I can't really discipline myself to focus on a few things as possible but to go as deep as I possibly can to be the number one in something. And so that's part of the decision and getting out of investing and not going to the house to do the listing appointment even though I mean, I passed up on a two and a half million dollar deal the other day and it was like I'm either holding true to this or I'm not so, whatever got to put your money where your mouth is so.

Nathan Daniel: 24:57
Yeah. Well and like you said earlier if you know that you've done that, and you've got your focus points that you're focused on, you can start to feel when you're getting outside of those comfort zones, right? Because you get uncomfortable, right? So I think you probably can start feeling yourself going, "Okay, maybe I'm in a zone I shouldn't be in" and that pulls you back to it. Well, okay. So, greatest lesson, I want to ask a couple of questions as we begin to wrap up here, what's the greatest lesson you've learned in the last six months?

Chandler Crouch: 25:28
Okay, I was trying to think about this. Okay, I would say the greatest lesson last six months. I don't know if this is it, but this is a good one. I learned it from watching the documentary, "Last Dance". It was a documentary about Michael Jordan and his run with the Bulls and what his career looks like. And what I realized after watching that was that, there are no special skills that that guy has that he didn't learn in Little League, whatever basketball, whatever you call that. He learned how to shoot, dribble, pass, all that, right off the bat in whenever he is in Little League, or whatever you call it. But and then as a professional, there are so many people that are so so good, what causes him to be so much better than all the rest. And the thing that he kept coming back to in that documentary was he would continually motivate himself and find excuses, find ways to lie to himself even figure out things that caused him to get motivated. And he would go into a game and his peers knew it. They're like, "Oh no, you should not have done that to Michael". And then he would bring his A-game and do these unbelievable things with it at the core of it. Sure, he's got unbelievable skills but so do a lot of people at that level. The thing that made him truly the most special is the way he motivated himself. And I just like, if that's the lesson that Michael Jordan needs, that's the thing that made him special, I need to take that to heart and really focus on motivating myself and our agents to just keep sparking that fire because that's where it's at. It's just an awesome lesson for me.

Nathan Daniel: 27:07
Learn to motivate yourself. Okay. I wrote that down, "The Last Dance" with Michael Jordan. I'm gonna go watch that documentary now. Okay, so you know, this, the show is for brokers, helping brokers and giving guidance lessons and all that kind of stuff. So looking back, if you were to give advice to somebody who's just getting started or growing the business the way you wanted to grow it, what advice would you give?

Chandler Crouch: 27:34
I've always thought that maybe it would have been better for me to start with a franchise company like Keller Williams, Century 21, REMAX any of them and work as part of a team just so I can see that. I've been independent from day one, I don't know. I wonder, at times I wonder if I stepped out of personal production a little too soon. Maybe I should have built that a little bit bigger, I don't know. So I don't know about the path, I think to each his own. And so I did it, I'm glad I did it. As far as advice I would give is, I would say it's this. There's no shortcut. And actually, the shortcut is the hard road, the hard road is the shortcut, the best way to get the best employees is, I made my hiring process, just insane. I make people jump through a bunch of hoops and I go really deep and making sure that I'm doing the best I can to hire the best person. And it's a lot of work upfront. But once I do that, then I have this incredible employee, that we're aligned with values and on the same mission, and I actually don't have to look over their shoulder and I'm actually super confident that they're gonna do a great job many times the job better than I could do it. And that's the ticket for me. I know that it's gonna be the ticket as I continue to scale. So the long road is or the hard road is the shortcut. I guess that would be okay.

Nathan Daniel: 29:04
Well, hey, thank you for that. I know sometimes it's easy to go the easy road but the hard roads are worth the journey, right? I know there's a quote out there around that and I'm going to end on this like we've been talking to Chandler Crouch out of Fort Worth, Texas and you had a quote that actually, that you said it's not passive care about the clients experience more than anything else so I'm gonna quote you on that if you don't mind.

Chandler Crouch: 29:28
Absolutely. No worries.

Nathan Daniel: 29:29
So anyway, if you want to get in touch with Chandler, chandlercrouch.com, the best way to do it. You can also find him on Facebook, same tags, all that stuff. Right?

Chandler Crouch: 29:39
Research Chandler Crouch anywhere and you'll be able to find it.

Nathan Daniel: 29:41
Okay, awesome. Well, Chandler, thank you again for coming on the show. I appreciate you pouring into us and given us a little bit of wisdom today. Appreciate you.

Chandler Crouch: 29:50
Thank you. It's been a fun anytime. Thank you.

Nathan Daniel: 29:55
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the broker-to-broker real estate podcast. If you liked what you heard, make sure you subscribe to the channel. For more information, tools and resources, go to www.brokertobrokerpodcast.com