Jon Brooks: Simply Brilliant

Tracy Hayes  1:01  
Hey, welcome back to The Real Estate excellence podcast with your host. Tracy Hayes, real producer in the house today, I have a co owner of one of the fastest growing real estate brokerages in Northeast Florida. He's actually, you're actually the founder, though, right? Co founder. Co founder

Jon Brooks  1:16  
got the wrong Brooks on the pod.

Tracy Hayes  1:18  
Co founder. He has recruited a list of solid producers at momentum Realty, and which is just blows my which many of several of them I had on the show already in 2015 he was a rookie of the year at a brokerage he was with. He's a coach, mentor, recruiter. He also has a lending side, a marketer, to mention a few hats he wears. He leads the Brooks group at momentum Realty, who served nearly 100 customers in 2021 for over almost $32 million in volume. Let's welcome the visionary John Brooks of momentum

Jon Brooks  1:49  
Realty to the show. Hey, thanks for

Tracy Hayes  1:50  
having me on. Thank you. You know I was the first thing I caught about you. I saw you. Saw your information. I tagged on. You saw Madeline. Madison. Yeah, Madison, Madison, Madison. I'm sorry, Madison, she's, yeah, she, I had her scheduled, actually last week, but she decided to go to Dominican Republic on me, she'll get back. Because I really, I just listened to her podcast, because she is amazing. Even you're young, she's younger than you. And listening to her and the things that she was talking about. And then, obviously, as I getting prepared, I started popping around and finding you on different podcasts. And the things that you're talking about and telling your story is, I mean, just amazing. The numbers you're putting out, I think you're in. You're definitely an inspiration to many, anyone out there listening, if you're a new agent, or maybe an agent who's just kind of maybe hit a lid, John's gonna have, I guarantee, if you listen long enough to this podcast, you're going to get some tips today. There's stuff's going to come out in this conversation. Awesome, and I'm excited about So John, tell us a little about Where'd you

Jon Brooks  2:48  
grow up? I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, which is a suburb right out of Washington, DC. So it's the Super Bowl of economics up there. It's a fast paced environment. And grew up there, yeah, for the first 1820 years of my life, went to Virginia Tech. I was the youngest of three brothers, so we're hyper competitive family. My brothers are geniuses, and so I got to keep up with them all the time. So then I moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 2014 for a job relocation. When I graduated, I was living in my mom's basement and doing the metro line into work every day. Realized, after a year of doing that, that I wasn't gonna make a good living, yeah, doing that, and I didn't have a good lifestyle. So those are two things. Like, from the beginning, after graduating, I was like, Oh, this is a little bit different than I expected, right? So my wife and I relocated to Jacksonville, Florida, and that really changed everything

Tracy Hayes  3:35  
for us now. But you didn't enter into real estate right away. No, tell us what you did, because I've obviously listened to podcasts. I want you to tell the story. What do you come to Jacksonville? What are

Jon Brooks  3:43  
you doing? Yeah, so I left a job that was phenomenal, and I had a lot of mentorship from partners at the company I was at before, and I did economics and statistics studies for companies that were looking to relocate headquarters. So I got to learn a lot about real estate through that, and learn tax policy economics through that. When I came to Jacksonville, the environment was different and I needed to switch jobs. It was just a different pace. I felt like the quality of the people I was working with was different than I had experienced in Washington, DC. And again, I'm young, so I don't I don't know you

Tracy Hayes  4:13  
were picking up on that, but that's true, though. I mean, I have family. I've lived outside DC. We visited North I lived in Northern Virginia for most of the 90s, corporations having some sort of presence in the greater DC area is part of the game.

Jon Brooks  4:26  
Yeah, yeah, you got to play the political game too. So I switched over and went to a Wall Street investment bank and became a real estate investment banker and all those hedge funds that are out there purchasing the single family rental properties, American homes for rent, invitation homes, all those and I would actually securitize those loans to go up to Wall Street, meet with the rating agencies, tranche out those loans, and then sell them internationally. And so I got to see the end game of what happens in real estate, which is

Tracy Hayes  4:49  
really so what was your major at Virginia Tech finance? Finance was your major? So, I mean, they only teach you so much. I mean, how do that? How do you, you know, a very young age. I mean, that's some high level stuff. And I. I've run into other young people that have gotten how do you kind of get introduced into that? Is it a network or who you know? I mean, that's

Jon Brooks  5:07  
it's mentorship and finding the right mentor, not somebody that says they know how to do it but doesn't actually know how to do it. So I was very Yeah, someone who's actually done what you want to do. So I had really good like, in every job that I've had, I've had the partner take me under their wing, and I was like their analyst, and I did their job for them, and they would kind of just manage me right? And so I got to learn the partner level stuff as a young guy, because my really hard work ethic, and they know that if I don't know how to do something, I'm going to act with integrity. I'm going to come back to them Be like, look, I don't want to do this. He even if his fundamental questions, I'm going to go back to them and get the

Tracy Hayes  5:39  
answer before I move forward. Just so we mentioned on the podcast, you sent me a podcast with the two gentlemen from Georgia. What's, what's the name of their focus? Yeah, the

Jon Brooks  5:48  
Harrison was a dual, I thought was dual agency podcast, dual

Tracy Hayes  5:51  
agency podcast. So we won't throw that amount there. You said something that was so and I was telling my wife about it last night. Actually, I might even tell Zach about, I couldn't remember, as I was telling someone about except, well, you made a statement there that a lot of these, a lot of our people in our industry, go out and they, they got that keynote speaker up there, or maybe they're at some big like a Keller Williams, big, huge event in Dallas, and they got these people up there speaking who aren't really, don't they speak this. They talk the talk, but they haven't walked the walk that actually have done the numbers that they're trying to teach you. You remember that part?

Jon Brooks  6:25  
Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, so there's been, like, this interesting phenomenon over the last seven years where whoever has the most money on their credit card can buy the most leads and have the biggest business, but that doesn't mean it's gonna be a profitable business, right? And so there's a lot of hypocrisy. So you might see, like, the major speakers on most of every single company, usually their number one, number two guys generally, are the ones that are investing the most in these online leads. A lot of them are not making as much profit behind the scenes, and that's something to be talked about, because you get into the business, why and to make so much money that you can get out of selling real estate or getting out of doing the day to day job, or you want to make an impact on the community things like this. A lot of these teams that are buying these online leads, they do the exact opposite. They're trying to make their money back after spending so much, and then they have a lot of turnover because they don't treat their people in the appropriate way. And then what happens is, it all, it all falls. It's a different

Tracy Hayes  7:16  
it's a different model. You know, I grew up at Quicken Loans and loan depot in the call center environment. I mean, their model is spend, all you know, they spend a tremendous amount of money on the lower my bills, Zillow leads, whatever's coming in, or when you're clicking, and they're calling before you get done. You know, those, those, they spend a lot of money doing that, and they know that they take in so much, they're going to get so much out the other end. They're going to turn the, you know, three to 8% somewhere in that and if you were doing 8% of your leads that you got it quick, and you were really good, right below three, you're probably, they're probably cutting you right now, because the retraction in the refined market so far, right? So, but you're right. I mean, it's, it's a different model to me. It's, you know, obviously, if you have a lot of money and you go long term, Quicken was able to turn that into a much larger you know, now they service mortgages, they have a model that people will invest in. But yeah, if you're down here and trying to get started, and you're spending all your money here, or when you run out of money, hopefully you're making enough on that back end. Or it's tough and it is a

Jon Brooks  8:15  
grind shop, yeah, and there are businesses that make money doing that, and there's nothing wrong with that way business. It's just one way business, but I feel like it's been the one that's been the most focused on. So instead of putting the person on stage who has the most volume in units, why don't we find the person that has the best profit, the best lifestyle, the best health and is completely financially free, because that's the right person to model from. If you're modeling from a false idol that you see that's like on the brink of bankruptcy because they're but they're on stage, and you don't know all the financial details,

Tracy Hayes  8:42  
they're just flipping the money, and hopefully they're, yeah, you could be modeling off of

Jon Brooks  8:46  
them, and then your business is going to look like theirs. Well, what is the point? What did you really get into real estate to do? Was it to be number one and have your ego stroked, or was it to become financially free and financially literate and then give back to the community in your own way?

Tracy Hayes  9:00  
Right? I totally agree. When you graduated from Virginia Tech, obviously being real estate agent was not, didn't seem to be from what I when I read or what I've watched you and listened to you. What was your What was your vision? 22 years old?

Jon Brooks  9:15  
So my parents, well, they were like, Okay, you're gonna quit your Wall Street investment banking job. You've got all these incredible mentors, and you're gonna go be a real estate agent Florida. I mean, their eyes are rolling. They're like, oh gosh, where did we go wrong? No, but, I mean, they I feel like they knew that I was going to be entrepreneurial, but there were things that happened to me that, like, made me have to go into it. Number one, there was a pay freeze at my company after I earned a ton of money for them, and I was doing a lot of work. And anyone who's in the investment bank, and you go in for the bonus at the end of the year, and so when they did a pay freeze, no bonuses, I said, Look, I don't want to have anybody else have control my life. And right before that, my uncle, who's an entrepreneur, he had a brain aneurysm, and it just hit me, and he said, John, you need to do something with your life. Don't just keep winging it and go. Going through the motions and do that corporate ladder, like, you really need to go do something. And so that hit me at the same time, we're buying our first house. We made an offer. The listing agent didn't respond for two days. And my wife at the time, Britain, you know, she was my girlfriend at the time, she was like, You should not go to the house and go north door knock on that. I was like, I'm gonna go do it. And so I door knocked and made the deal with the seller directly, and we close that house. We still own it today. It'll be passed down to our to our daughter as an investment property, and making great money for us now. And so that's really what caused me to get in, is is the pain of the real estate transaction by people who just didn't care about the consumer, the inability to have income that accurately reflected the amount of effort that I put into my job. And so those two things, along with the pain of, hey, life is short. You need to do something. Caused me to hop in at age 24 with no money. I mean, I hadn't I had nothing real phone. So Nope, you're

Tracy Hayes  10:53  
starting to lead into one of the things that I'm, you know, interviewing nearly almost 60 agents. Now, at least 55 plus of top agents, you're starting to lead into something. And when I more I listen to like your your production, just as yourself. And then the people you're attracting to momentum. I'm seeing their numbers. You know, at least, you know they're posting and what, what they're doing. You quickly, if I, if I can summarize and tell me if I'm right or wrong, you quickly realize there's such a soft spot in the real estate industry that only less than, like, 1% that really are just totally exploiting that soft spot. And I'm sorry, I'm starting to hear you say it, and I've hear a lot of these agents talk about it. And you know when, because you were upset the site, the listing agent didn't call for two days. That's like, you know, most people would have just given up on the property. You went over there, and now you're seeing, like any entrepreneur, you're like, there's a weakness here. And the weakness is people, yeah, yeah, and their mindset of how this business is supposed to run and how you can exploit it. So you go into real estate, you end up at, Likert is where you started, right? Yeah. What led you there? Did you know someone there? Or what

Jon Brooks  12:01  
I did? I followed my agent that had sold me the house to go there because it was the only place that I knew. And I was like every other agent. I didn't do any diligence. I had no idea. I didn't read my independent contractor agreement. I did all the wrong things myself, and I wish someone had had a podcast or talking about all of these things before I hopped in. Right? And so that's what happened? So my first year, I sold 66 properties for 12 point 1 million. Back in 2016 so today's market value that, right? Yeah. 2017 I got a little bit smarter. Focused on my price point, sold 20 million plus for 74 units. 2018 my wife Brittany came into the game.

Tracy Hayes  12:35  
Someone had, I mean, was there someone there? You take the test. You're a very smart guy. So I mean, memorizing the contractor, understanding how those things, that's an easy class for you. But really, the people step you know, you don't get the 66 home you move from here. Did you know anyone here in Jacksonville?

Jon Brooks  12:52  
No, I didn't know. I had no money, no database, no anything. I mean,

Tracy Hayes  12:56  
so what were you doing to attract 66 people to buy or sell a home with you.

Jon Brooks  13:01  
I worked hard, I mean, so I the first thing I did was I started door knocking everyone in my neighborhood that I had just bought my house in. And eventually, after three months, somebody let me list their property, property. I did open house on it every single day. I got buyers all over the place, and then the neighbor down the

Tracy Hayes  13:16  
street the listing as a bait, Yeah,

Jon Brooks  13:20  
huge missed opportunity. Like agents out there right now, you got lazy. They're not doing all the activities around the listings to maximize them, right? And it's an easy way to get free business. You don't need to buy online leads. You can do an open house and have 40 buyers walk through it right now, if it's in the right price point, right

Tracy Hayes  13:34  
area, what? Because you probably know the statistic. What is the percentage of people who walk into a an open house that don't have an agent, that are actually actively considering buying some some are just the neighbors want to be nosy and walk through the house.

Jon Brooks  13:50  
That's what I want. I want the nosy need my next listing. Look so I'm in the game of relationships, so all I know is that if they have an agent, they don't have an agent they I got in front of them. My name is John Brooks. I'm a local real estate agent. You live in the area as well. They might not be buying from me this time around, but they might know their next person that's going to buy, and if I do a really good job and represent myself well and build a relationship with them, or maybe friend request them on Facebook or stay connected on it Instagram, and we just stay connected. I'm playing the long game. I think a lot of agents are playing the very short, short, how do I just make money off of somebody right now? That's not the conversation. How do I build enough relationships in the community that know, like and trust me, where they're going to eventually send referrals into me?

Tracy Hayes  14:30  
How many? I mean, I see it daily where people are moving into these subdivisions in our area, and especially from out of the state, and they're calling their friends and family saying, hey, you need to move here too. And, you know, to have obviously had get that relationship is a possibly another handful of sales over the next couple years. Just calling your friends and family. Grandma wants to move a little closer, you know. But they're also, I see it, you know, as obviously building with a new builder, you know, and working specifically. Be with subdivision. So I'm seeing the names come up. They're telling their brother, their sister, their cousin, and they're all moving in the same neighborhood, and some agent is got to take that lead and do that follow up. That's that's, you're

Jon Brooks  15:10  
just relational. And you show that you care about people over time they will. And if you ask them for help and say, This is my goal for the year, can you help me reach it? They people go out of their way to help people. When you ask for it, and you give them clarity.

Tracy Hayes  15:23  
On what your goal is, do you have to? I can't remember the last person I know. I've asked this question before, but do you have to? We talked about relationship building. So when you're out there your first year, 66 homes, you're doing a lot of relationship building. You're really good at it. Yeah, do you actually sit, sit back, or maybe you took some tips from someone's book or something. What is it that kept you fresh in mind? Of making sure you were focused on that focus on making sure, you know, we don't always click with everybody, right? You know, there's some people just you know that some people are standoffs you. They may really love you, but you don't know that because they're not reacting the way we would expect them to react, right? So what do you have to actually think about, hey, oh, hey, you know what? Mrs. Smith, I haven't actually done this with her, and this is my process. I haven't bought her a coffee, or what flowers, or whatever it is. I don't know what it is. Do you have to actually think through that? Or is it come natural to you to do that?

Jon Brooks  16:18  
It's both. It's both. I think there's a lot of stuff that you can systematize to get content out in front of your audience that they care about. And you also have to do the personal touches to show them that you care about them.

Tracy Hayes  16:30  
The reason why it's natural things that you do don't know right now calls you up. Somebody from Virginia referred you so there's no connection locally you don't know them, that a whole hell. But what is, what are like a couple of things that you make sure you do or consistently with each of your your buyers that might be coming in that help build those relationships? What are some things that you do? You take them off at lunch. I don't know.

Jon Brooks  16:56  
What is it so? So, just to go back to the natural, it's natural because I had such a bad experience and that pain still fuels me. I'm like, the person that served me didn't care in like, I got into the business because I care and like, I want to make it better for everybody. So what are the some, some of the things that we do, I mean, with the the Brooks group that's run by Michelle Weaver and has got Ella woods and Daniel Callaway, we've got some great agents there. What we do is we have a customer touch program that's over 100 touches per year, and we plan it out at the beginning of the year. For the full year, it's in the calendar. There's exactly what it's cost, what it's supposed to do, and like everybody should do this, it's just natural business some of its electronic mail, email, text, phone call, client Appreciation Event drop by on a rotation, but it's doing but when we see them, they know that we care. When they come in to one of our events, and we're meeting with them, and we're hanging out, we get to see their family, and they're bringing their friends as well. They they know you can tell when someone's genuinely interested in you, and when they're just there to try to get a transaction off of you, you can tell, and we're very much relational. So one

Tracy Hayes  17:59  
of the things you do is you guys have regular past client events. Is that what I'm hearing

Jon Brooks  18:03  
we did before covid, and now that we've passed it off to the team, we haven't been as good with it because we've been so focused on building all these other businesses, because we realize we can have an even bigger impact by helping agents grow even faster and have a bigger impact through them, versus just doing it all internally ourselves.

Tracy Hayes  18:19  
Okay, so you have a mapped out plan for the year marketing just on past clients. Yeah, touches, or I wouldn't say they say, maybe just someone who walked in the open house. They may be somewhat looking half heartedly right now, but you're touching them. Yeah, 100 times, yeah, 100 times a year.

Jon Brooks  18:37  
Yeah. They get put into the database, and they just get a lot of

Tracy Hayes  18:40  
it, roughly twice a week. Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah, touch them and they love it.

Jon Brooks  18:44  
I mean, it's not stuff that's gonna waste their time. It's not spam, it's stuff that they actually

Tracy Hayes  18:48  
care about. Now, were you with Weicker right up to momentum in 2020? You started?

Jon Brooks  18:52  
No, I was at Weicker, and then I wanted to learn how

Tracy Hayes  18:54  
to build it. KW, yeah, okay, all right. You went to K and you started doing some coaching there.

Jon Brooks  18:59  
I was their youngest mastery coach, I believe, and that propelled my business forward. I was a mega camp speaker two years in a row. I spoke about profitability of small teams and then review, repeat and referral business, because people are trying to figure out, how are these agents growing so fast, so profitably? And I still see them on social media, going on vacation for three months of the year. How are you doing that? Right? And so a lot of so we were teaching and coaching a lot of the agents in the marketplace up until that point, we were hired, we were paid to go around and teach these classes in other states and other locations throughout Florida. So when we opened, there was just a line out of the door with real estate agents who wanted to learn. How did they do it so fast, right? Some people, that takes them 1015, 20 years to get to get to that point. How do you do it in three and a half?

Tracy Hayes  19:44  
So in a way, the you probably, maybe you saw this the beginning, but you developed through the tour, through speaking, that that was a way for you to gain exposure to your influence and

Jon Brooks  19:54  
credibility. It wasn't on purpose, let me just right,

Tracy Hayes  19:56  
yeah, you started doing it, and you're realizing all these people are. Are, you know, they're following you on social media. They're going to your events. They're listening to every everything you say. Because let me tell you when I the things well, when I miss Beal, when I listen to her, and I can see, obviously, she's learned. I assume she I just assume I don't know the two of you personally, but she's learned a lot from you and your team, quickly and at her very young age, is so high level, just listening to her answer your questions when you were talking to her and then watching you, you guys are on another level. You're on you're on a level that even, trust me, there's people that never reached that level. But what amazes me and is so exciting about it is the because one of the things you mentioned was personal development, yeah, you know to get when you're out there coaching and talking these people, you have to be confident. You have to know your stuff and then not and then you got to actually be able to put it out, you know, explain it to them, right? And getting out the target. That's not easy. Yeah, yeah. You have to have

Jon Brooks  20:53  
work ethic, and you have to have the intellect to be able to serve. And that's part of the problem of the real estate industry in general, is that the standards to get into the industry are so low. I mean, I think I got my license in one week, and with less than $1,000 I was able to launch and I'm managing someone's largest financial transaction. Well, I'm used to managing financial transactions that can be up to a billion, and I have to have all these licenses, and it takes, it can take a very long time. Here I'm managing someone's largest financial asset, and I can be in the business in one week, right? And that is where a lot of the problems stem. And people think it's easy, and they're not. They're kind of they don't know what it is when they get into it, and then they realize that it's all about lead generation and caring about

Tracy Hayes  21:32  
people, right? That made me think, is it easy? Anyone? Did anyone ever tell you? Because I had have agents on here who clearly stated friends of theirs told them they couldn't do it. I don't think you ever had. You seem to be too strong of a guy. You You were steamrolling for everything

Jon Brooks  21:46  
my wife had that happen to her. Yeah, and you should, you should interview her. You know, her story is unbelievable. So she that happened to her, and that lit a fire under her, and in her first year, she sold 66 buyer clients, buyer clients. In 2018 100% buyers. Well, I went off and did the listing side, and she did that all in our first year. And that wasn't on accident. So her in that it was fueled because someone told her that she would

Tracy Hayes  22:12  
never succeed, never be good at it's just

Jon Brooks  22:15  
some use it as fuel. I mean, yeah,

Tracy Hayes  22:18  
there's no doubt you have to hear you have to use it as fuel. And just that people will will do that. And it wasn't like she was going to go, Hey, I'm going to go skydive, or I'm going to, you know, for a living or something. And someone's, oh, no, I don't want you to do that, because maybe one time the shoot won't Hey, how far can you go as a real estate agent? And then if she fails, she fails. But don't. Why would you tell somebody

Jon Brooks  22:38  
it's just a reflection of themselves exactly. I think they're just talking about themselves.

Tracy Hayes  22:42  
You talk about personal development in the podcast. What do you do? You gave me this great book here. Of everyone, I'm gonna have to read this now. I'm reading Tim Tebow book right now. Oh yeah, yeah. So as soon as I finish up with that, I will. I'll dive into that one. But tell me, what do you are you a podcast, podcast books. What do you do to stay sharp.

Jon Brooks  23:00  
I look I turned off the news, yes, so I did that too. Yeah. I have my life back, and I have very low stress levels, so I don't, I don't do the news. So what I do to stay up to date is I listen to a lot of podcasts, like the all in podcast, which is great one I like Tim Ferriss. I read about a book a week, and I get them from people that you know are further along in the journey for me. And I ask them, you know, what's something that's made them that's made an impact for you? And they, they send me a book, or I go buy the book. You like reading the hardcover? I can't. I have to listen to listen. Yeah, okay, I can't. I can't sit for that long. So usually I'll be walking around the neighborhood, you know, trying to listen habit stack. So I'm like, getting the exercise and listening.

Tracy Hayes  23:37  
Get your steps in and listen to the to the books. But, I mean, how do you, you know, I think a lot of people miss out on that. I there's some people have gotten successful and they've picked up their personal development or just, you know, maybe they were just brought up that way. I don't know. They're they're there. Majority of us need something. And to me, when you listen, take the information out of Ryan's book, or take the inner grants card, or Justin Donald's book right here, and you take it, and you Osmose some of that into you. It's energy, and obviously some mental power too, which makes you feel good, and it gets you through the day, gets you through the week. You're now in front of people, and they look at you, and you know this, this guy's got it going on. He looks good, he's he feels good. He's confident about himself. I think a lot of people miss that part. I mean, obviously good exercise gives you a little bit of that too. There also has to be some mental exercise.

Jon Brooks  24:29  
So at first I thought personal development was so lame. I mean, I can't I was one of those. So I get those people that are like, oh, and then I started going to these conferences, and I come out of the conference, and I would have a different perspective. And it wasn't on purpose. It was just from being in the room and hearing through osmosis, just being there, and I'd kind of be like, I think that worked a little bit, like, I hated it, but it worked, and then it just kind of stuck with me, like, I'm getting really good at this. I'm getting better, and so I just started becoming a junkie. So now I go to, like, a conference almost every month, to go to go meet with speakers and everything. Like that, like Ryan Sirhan. I'm meeting him at the end of the month. Yeah, where's he sounded in Miami? Oh, there's the abundance of that. Yeah, he's one of the keynote speakers that, you know, that kind of stuff. Access you get. You get access to it. Just really,

Tracy Hayes  25:10  
how inspired is. Obviously, you know, unless someone gave you the ticket, you're investing yourself. You're gonna go down there. You spend a couple nights in a hotel. It might, it might, it might cost you a couple $1,000 to go to the event. And maybe there might be, out of two, I don't know how many days a two day event or something,

Jon Brooks  25:28  
that's like four or five, yeah, it's a long Yeah, yeah. So out of all that,

Tracy Hayes  25:31  
maybe there's like an hour that, if you were able to just fly right in and be there for that hours, all the information are you actually like, ooh, that's new. I need to implement it. Or, whoa, you know, gave you some energy, but you have to spend some money on yourself and some time to get those nuggets. They're not just someone's not just going to give you a list. Here's all the goal. You have to do some digging.

Jon Brooks  25:51  
Yeah, and I wouldn't even say it's about the conference. It's just about the people you meet there. So most of the time I'm meeting people in the hallways that have become some of my best friends, or I start investing with them, in private companies, stuff like that, just because I was there. And the guys who are growing the fastest are the ones that are doing the largest level of personal development in gals, I would say both.

Tracy Hayes  26:11  
So well, give us, give us a tip here. I don't know, maybe you don't even think about this, because obviously I go to the last big one I went to was where I was, you know, just not something controlled by the company, but just random. I went to the Podcast Movement in Nashville last August, and, yeah, there's some, there's you got to find the people who are the people. You know, I'm saying there's a there's a bunch of followers, bunch of people are going to go there, who are real estate agents in the area, just going to go there. But they're not the success that you want to hang out with. How do you find those people in those events?

Jon Brooks  26:41  
You just talk to people. It's just like an open house. See, you ask a lot of questions. So I don't usually talk about myself very much. I usually I'm just like, who are you? Like, how'd you end up here? What do you have going on in your life? Like, what, what brought you out to this event? Like, you know, just being like a normal person, like you should, right? Instead of the person that you know, sits in their room and just goes to the conference and then runs back up to the room. I did that at first, and then I started realizing there's not a lot of value in that. The value is finding other growth minded individuals to surround yourself with. And sometimes they're not your marketplace, so you have to go to them, right?

Tracy Hayes  27:14  
Yeah, well, you can outgrow your market a little bit. And, you know, I think even even, you know, we think about some people who may be listening this, you may outgrow some the people in your office, where you are. I'm going to use this term because I steal from mortgage marketing. You may be the stallion and you're hanging out, there's a bunch of ponies in your office, and you've got to go out and find the other stallions to hang with that surround yourself by those people.

Jon Brooks  27:36  
Yeah. I mean, that's the number one conversation. Is that you you hit a natural peak of achievement at your office, and you have no one left to learn from. What do you do? Right? So you can either go to outside resources or you can switch companies to get access to different people.

Tracy Hayes  27:50  
Who do you hang with? And I ask this question because, again, it's one of those common things. I'm hearing common themes. I see a lot of these top agents out hanging out together. They may be from different brokerages, but they're going out and having a glass of wine, eating, if I have lunch or whatever, or maybe their families are hanging out. I see it on social media. They're doing it. Who or who are you? Who do you look to hang out with,

Jon Brooks  28:13  
besides my kids? Yeah, I mean, my daughter and I are at the zoo every Saturday or the alligator farm. So I spent a lot of time with

Tracy Hayes  28:21  
annual pass, with the alligator farm I do, yeah,

Jon Brooks  28:25  
she loves gators and snakes. I mean, she's my world right now, so and my son Jackson as well, and with Brittany. So I really spend the most of the time with Brittany. I don't spend as much time out networking as you would think. A lot of it has been in creating content that people are interested in then traveling to the conferences to meet. So I go to the

Tracy Hayes  28:44  
Tracy bundle it in a conference, and you go and put when you're there conversations your daughter's not with you.

Jon Brooks  28:49  
Yeah, I have to be super intentional with my time, but I don't do a lot of social stuff. When it comes to the business side of it. I'd rather do it on the personal.

Tracy Hayes  28:56  
Well, you have, I mean, the some of the people, because I've had, obviously had a few of them on, I mean, and then I'm sure there's more. As I dig through your I don't wanna call your staff, but your team, there's a lot of people that hang out there. There's a lot of brilliant people that you've brought into the fold and that you're surrounding yourself on a daily basis, even in the casual work environment, that are pushing it and obviously following you. I assume they're following you and motivated by you, but they're bringing in a lot of brilliance too.

Jon Brooks  29:21  
Yeah, they bring it. You know, there's me and Brittany. We're spending a lot of time with them, and the energy level at momentum is so infectious. The agents are just growing, and they inspire each other, and they challenge each other to do more, and it's collaborative. It's not competitive, and that's different from the offices that I came with came from.

Tracy Hayes  29:37  
All right, so you recently, or I didn't actually look at the time schedule. You started your own Integrity Mortgage Group.

Jon Brooks  29:45  
So we started a mortgage branch in May 2020, which was an interesting time to start a branch, because all the guidelines were changing as you know, yeah. And then we also opened a JV title relationship as well. So what we're doing at momentum is we're building the bundle of services because. There is more money in mortgage entitled than there is in real estate. So just by an agent joining this platform, the ecosystem actually has more profitability in it. So our long term vision is, how do the agents get a piece of the pie, the full pie, just by changing platforms? Because there's not a current platform that has all of them set up and that benefit the agent benefits from, right? So that's our long term vision with

Tracy Hayes  30:24  
the company, which, you know, obviously we're here with a large builder, their benefit as us as their their let them in the package deal, obviously, title companies downstairs. But how do you obviously, I mean, you guys seem to be doing enough deals obviously, keep a few loan officers busy if all your agents are referring 101 of the things that in my loan officer world, yeah, may say, is this situation that you got here? Is that because you are tagged, just like I'm tagged with my lender and my builder here, as we discussed pre show, yeah, I assume is your model just to work your agents, and I mean your agents, you know, giving enough back, and they see the benefit in that. Because you obviously some agents, you know, they have their I think Miss Beale has her relationship outside of the circle here that we're talking about. So how do you motivate your agents to try to keep it in house and let them understand that there's a whole circle of profits here that is going to benefit you, and come back to you.

Jon Brooks  31:23  
Yeah? So first off, we would be really careful, because there's RESPA, yeah. So there's, like, the way that you structure it, in the way that you're able to participate. We don't push anybody to do anything they don't want. So that's, like the first thing. We don't even talk about it. It's not even a conversation. We just say, here's our preferred vendor partners, and if you're interested in sharing with them, here's here's who they are. And the goal is to give such great service that we get the repeat cut, the repeat business, and that's where the money is.

Tracy Hayes  31:47  
So I'm an agent sitting in front of you right now. I mean, it's a business model, okay, sure, if we keep it in house this, we're going to create additional revenues, which I can then, you know, obviously not take as much as your commission, right type of thing? You know, we could open more offices. I don't know what is the pitch that you a new agent, that you give him of what the because obviously you're selling the benefits of momentum, but I'm sure you're mentioning the title company and so forth.

Jon Brooks  32:15  
We're really not, not, yeah, we don't. We don't even talk about it. I mean,

Tracy Hayes  32:19  
I'm digging deep in here, because I'm trying to figure out I don't

Jon Brooks  32:23  
have a I don't have a secret sauce. It's just look, if you see value what we're doing. Here's two preferred vendor partners that can make this move faster, if you choose to do so. But a lot of our agents are top agents. Yeah, like majority of them already have their relationships. They've been around for a while. I'm not going to try to compete with that. And I don't want to, the goal is, first off, their business, and that they come first. So whatever they choose to do is up to them. If they want to hear this option that's available, they can.

Tracy Hayes  32:51  
They can come to me. I'm just I, I'm just curious how someone, you know, an owner, in your position, how you present that. But I think, I think you probably do it the same way a lot of them do is, hey, you're coming to momentum. This is what momentum is giving you as an agent. Yeah. I mean, integrity is offices down the hall there, if you want to go talk to them,

Jon Brooks  33:10  
yeah, if you're interested in connecting, here's the relationship. Yeah, we're not pushy. It's not, it's not what the business model is based off of, but long term, it's what we're building. Is that total ecosystem,

Tracy Hayes  33:21  
you brought your wife on. She didn't start with you. She came on a couple years after you, right?

Jon Brooks  33:26  
So 2016 2017 it was just me, and then being a bad leader and trying to figure out how to be a good sales leader, and falling on my face and getting a coach and getting a coach out of and then 2018 she came in. So it was like late 2017 2018 what was Brittany doing prior to she was investment banker, okay, yeah, yeah. So she was doing the same thing, and she's also a CPA. And so when she came in, we said, look, husband, wife, team, we're gonna murder each other because we're both high achiever, learner profiles. How do we split this up? She took all buyers. I took all sellers. We had an ISA in from there. It just, it just exploded, because she's also relational based. It's not transactional. We really care about.

Tracy Hayes  34:04  
I mean, tell us something that you can tell us you're in business with your wife, sure, an idea that you had, or maybe she had, that the other totally disagreed with, and was it shot down and actually moved forward. So I imagine her idea probably move forward. Your idea got shot down. But that's that would be the obvious guess. But give us something where you guys actually had a little bit of a you didn't see eye to eye. It didn't the other ones, like, no, no,

Jon Brooks  34:30  
I would say almost everything. So she, she's an editor type, so I'm a visionary type, so I put out five visions a day. And then she's like, That's stupid, that's stupid, that's stupid, that's not bad, right? And then so she's like, let's do that one.

Tracy Hayes  34:46  
So sounds like me and my wife. It's a healthy

Jon Brooks  34:49  
relationship, because she can kind of gameplay it out. And then she's also the integrator, so she's the one that needs to go execute it and wants to go execute it, so it's got, it has to make sense. And so she's been for. Nominal. I mean, she's the she is momentum at this point. It's just

Tracy Hayes  35:03  
you and I are at 30,000 feet. We're seeing, we're seeing all these opportunities and things were coming up with these there was a word for it. I was watching Steve Harvey clipped the other day, and Steve Harvey, the guy, said the word, I try to remember what it was. And Steve Harvey's like, I only had a high school education. What was that word you said? And basically was having these ideas, these visions that we have, and we spit them out, and then we have a wife that actually goes, this can be executed. This is not going

Jon Brooks  35:30  
to be well. I mean, look, all this has been built in the last two years, and we're going to we're on track for 800 million we've got a mortgage branch and a title JV, and that all happened within two years. I can't do that on my own. I have to have incredible people like Brittany, who's gonna see it, implement it, you know, help fix it, when when it breaks, or when it grows and evolves over time. So a lot of it is like, we're experimenting. We're on the cutting edge of like, what we think will work next. And we're testing, testing, testing the things that work. We then share with our real estate agents.

Tracy Hayes  36:01  
I imagine, like anything because of the volume you're doing, to do little tweaks and see if they work. You can see that pretty quickly, because you are just versus I got transaction here, transaction here. You know, it's hard to follow any tweaks where you're having so many and then obviously having so many great people to execute it. Tell us the structure of the you just got one office right now? Are you opening others or a lot of people working virtually? What's your what's that whole setup?

Jon Brooks  36:28  
So it is completely virtual. So we have a co working space. Our agents work virtually. We're actually in 14 locations throughout Florida. We're a top 10 brokerage in Gainesville as well. Gainesville, Florida, and agents keep being attracted to the business model and the content that we put out there, and they reach out and they say, look, I want to have that type of growth too. And then they join us. And if they don't really have any issue being virtual, there's other companies that have proven to be virtual. You don't need to spend all that money on the overhead for the office. We've considered it like three or four times. And then we realize we drive by the other offices that are big, the big ones in town, there's no one in there. Like, why are you paying 20 to 30% more in your splits to have an office that you never go to? Right? What is the additional benefit that you're actually receiving for paying three to four times more?

Tracy Hayes  37:13  
How often does the Local Group, you guys, you guys, get together? Do you have, like, a monthly Social or something, just see each other and share.

Jon Brooks  37:22  
We do we get we get together quite a bit. It is virtual. So if anybody needs anything, they just call me, or Brittany or Michelle Weaver or somebody, or we have this really active Facebook group where people answer each other's questions. So there's never a point within a 24 hour period you wouldn't get what you need anyway. It's just you're getting it virtually, versus having to spend an hour driving across town to have that same exact conversation, or we jump on Zoom and share screen and we solve it there. So we don't really see there it being necessary, but we do get together, like you might see on Facebook. We get together for lunches and trainings and all that kind of stuff, probably twice a month that we like to do it just because we love our people. And when we meet with them, they share with us their struggles, and then we go out and find a solution for them

Tracy Hayes  38:01  
and bring it back to them that is so important, that's a microcosm of any office, really. I mean, if you think about you have to, I think the last couple of years is really, yeah, we think it's easy working from home and so forth. But after over time, the mind starts working on you. You have to go in. We're humans. We're social people, social animals, and you have to have some interaction and to see your reaction and and talk to you, or it could be a one on one on the screen. You're having a conversation, but I mean, at least you're seeing each other's face versus sight unseen. You're forgotten almost because someone gets so busy. Oh, I haven't talked to someone that so in a couple weeks, yeah. And you need, you need that little bit interaction more some people more than others. You started recently, and I saw the Facebook ascend group explain the extend group, momentum to momentum.

Jon Brooks  38:57  
Champion, champions, yes, yeah. So we so none of this has been planned. It's all been from experimenting and see what works. I just want to be clear on that we had no intention for it to come through like this, but for our first two years, we rejected agents that produce less than 10 units in their first year because we said, If you produce less than 10, you're probably part time, or you're not able to provide good enough service because you don't have enough reps or and we didn't really have a training platform for new agents, right? Because we didn't want to, because our level of conversation that we get excited about is people who have businesses that want to grow them and scale them, or live a big life and have a lifestyle and profitability. That's our message, and that's our conversation, the stuff that we talk about. But we had a point where we look back at the data, and the data said you had 200 people that you denied from the company. And we said, well, that's a business opportunity, because we just created another brokerage for somebody else. And so we said, What if we created a brokerage for or a an LLC group for new agents and part time agents that still. Fit the culture, still have a growth mindset. Just are not at that level of production, because there are a lot of people that we sent away to go get trained other companies thinking back, saying, Well, I still want to be here. I just, you know, I need to get the production. I'll show you. I can do it. So what we said was, why don't we give our agents for the top producers at our company an opportunity to buy into this new company that we're launching? Okay, so there's 22 investors that bought in for $10,000 a pop into this new entity, and those investors also required for three hours per month to give their time to those new agents. So now you have immediate it's it's working really well. You've got a group of people that really care about training the next crop of real estate agents. This also is our mission. Makes them sharper, because they

Tracy Hayes  40:43  
got to stay on top of the game, because they're gonna go to their team.

Jon Brooks  40:46  
They can recruit them to their team. They can use them as showing agents. They can get them to do the ground work around open houses. They can, you know, they can teach them by showing and doing, versus sitting in a classroom for five hours listening to somebody that wrote a textbook sounds like an idea. That's what I love. It's it's working. And people are traveling. We think we had three more people join today. So it's our first month. We have about 15 people in ascend. They they pay more than the momentum platform, but they can graduate out of it once they hit a certain level of production. So ascend is for zero to 12 units. Once you get 12 units in a calendar year, you can graduate into momentum elite. Momentum Elite is 12 units to 30 units, and then once you pass 30 units, about 8 million in volume, you can become a momentum champion. And that's when you get access to phantom stock units, and that ties you to the upside of momentums growth. So we're double rewarding these top agents with investment opportunities that they wouldn't be able to get elsewhere. Well, what can I do with that 220 that they just gave me? I can go buy a commercial property that we can underwrite together as a group. We can create a hedge fund, we can buy stock, we can do whatever we want as a group, and the money that it makes from ascend goes back to those investors that invested in it. So we built this ecosystem that feeds and trains itself. And it's not perfect. It's our first month, but I like it'll be, it'll be phenomenal. You explain that very well.

Tracy Hayes  42:04  
I picked up on that exactly what you I mean. I don't know the inner workings of real estate brokerage. And obviously, you know you have different agents come to you. You know the different splits and how you how you doing that you can stay more uniform. And obviously they understand the graduation, almost like that promotion to go to momentum. I've reached this Imagine, imagine the cut they're getting. They're making more per transaction in momentum than obviously in send. Because you're spending a lot of time and energy training them, you have to have a different platform that spends a has to cater to the new agent. That's brilliant.

Jon Brooks  42:38  
And I love that. And the reason it came about is something that was in the back of me and Brittany's mind since the beginning, because at our company, we asked for ownership, and we wanted ownership of the ancillary services too, because we knew how much money they had been making, and we were like, we can't get this at a big box. They there no way you're getting any sort of ownership of the company or anything else unless you buy out that entire franchise, and most of them are already locked up. So we always are thinking, what's the next thing that we can do to reward our people that's not a trophy and is actually something that's valuable to them and their family long term, and that would be additional investment opportunities that they can't get anywhere else, right? Right? And just the

Tracy Hayes  43:15  
high level golly, oh man, because you're such a brilliant guy, and I imagine the things for these guys to be around you and follow in the nuggets that you're dropping on the floor that they can scoop up. And that's powerful stuff you mentioned several times in this conversation. Already content, yeah, and obviously, those watching Social Media and Content, this is content we're providing right here. This is going to be, you know, it's in video. We're going to have it on audio. It's going to be spliced up in reels. There's content being put out there, but you are also referencing content directly to these people in ascend and momentum for teaching purposes, directly, how important, how much, what percentage of time or so. I'm sure you probably have something how you relate this to them. Should agents be spending on education and receiving good content?

Jon Brooks  44:10  
So first thing in terms of how much money you should spend on your education, for me, it's 10% of my income, regardless of how much money I make. And I've that's been something I've done since the beginning. But how much time you should spend? I think that you should also have it stacked. So when you're going for a run or walk, you should be listening to educational personal development content. I mean, the fast, the people who are going the fastest, again, they're doing the personal development work. They're doing the inner work that then is creating the out, the outer conversations that happen the people who don't, who usually have big egos, they think they can do everything themselves. They don't need any sort of personal development. They, you know, they know everything. Know It All. They know it all. Those aren't the people that we have at momentum. So we actually have rejected some eight and $12 million producers because they just reach out and, you know, they're like, I already know how to do everything. I'm just. Me, because you guys are really affordable, we say, well, that's probably not the right fit. There's other companies that you can go to that would be a better fit for that, because this company is about personal development, personal growth, because you're gonna be able to serve your customers better, you're gonna scale

Tracy Hayes  45:13  
better, you're gonna have a better lifestyle. You don't know what you don't know. And for someone, when someone says, you know, I know it all, I'm sorry. Our businesses are constantly evolving the current market condition. If we, you and I, are like, we couldn't even envision the current market condition. Say, just two years ago, to say, oh, yeah, two years it could be like this. Because we've never seen this before. And you know how offers are being structured. You know which is the best deal coming in for your your buy, your seller, and so forth. These are these. These things are constantly in motion, and you got to surround, surround yourself with other people who are doing it, because this situation over here, you may never, ever see it again, and but when, if you do, you are already in that circle, and someone already told you that story, and you go, how did you handle that deal? This is similar to what I got right they miss out on that because they're just again. They think they know it all. You just don't. I don't know anyone that could say Einstein obviously never had that attitude.

Jon Brooks  46:13  
Yeah, and we're not in the business of changing people, so we would rather just pick all the growth minded people, get them into a room and have conversations about variables that actually matter, not the stuff that's all the smoke and mirrors that doesn't matter, which, unfortunately, a lot of other companies, here's a trophy, here's volume, here's units, and that's an indicator, right? That's an important metric, but it doesn't tell the whole story. So we dig deeper, and we were very focused on the transparency conversations,

Tracy Hayes  46:38  
yeah, there's, there's the recognition that as you get older, it's like, yeah, recognize me with some cash. You know, I've got expenses. I got a college fund over here on funding. I'm thinking about retiring. Yeah, the recognition, yeah, makes me feel good for a moment, but that doesn't pay the bills.

Jon Brooks  46:54  
Cooler would it be to say I'm an equity owner of this company, and I'm an investor in this new company that we launched, and I'm actually spending time making the community better, right? Versus just getting a trophy, right? That's just different. And we saw that because we got a ton. I mean, we were leaving with tons of trophies at all these events, and we're like, this, we threw them away, yeah. We're like, this is cool in

Tracy Hayes  47:16  
my house for all this stuff. And then I got to dust them.

Jon Brooks  47:19  
Has an expiration date. It's just, you know, it's like, it might be tomorrow. It's like, if you're good in the moment, everybody claps, then you walk off the stage and you're like, Yeah, you know, I didn't really feel good because my bank account doesn't reflect what the trophy is saying, right? And so you're rewarding this the wrong metric.

Tracy Hayes  47:34  
Well, when you start to personally develop, you start to understand that. And obviously, I'm sure you've talked about, whether it's Grant Cardone or anything. You know, what is your value? And you know, what is it? If you're, you know, you're out there teaching as you they're, they're teaching the momentum. What's the laptop level? In champions, the champions are teaching the ASCEND because they have a stake in the ascends success, correct? Versus, hey, I got you up there. Great. You got a trophy, and I'll pat you on the back. Yeah? I mean that that's great and all. But you really want to go deep. You really want to go long term. It's having that vested interest in your success is really where it's at, yeah,

Jon Brooks  48:12  
and in a sustainable, long term focused business, not something that they're trying to just get a quick, you know, get rich quick scheme, because that usually doesn't work out the way.

Tracy Hayes  48:21  
So we just got talking about education and its importance. You're constantly trying to provide content cutting every day, whether bringing speakers, I think you mentioned TEDx talks.

Jon Brooks  48:32  
Yeah, we had two TEDx speakers come in. We had Eric Maddox, the guy who captured Saddam Hussein, that did interrogation led to his capture. And then we had Anil Gupta, who wrote the book on the happiness formula, so physically brought them in. We I paid out of my own pocket $12,000 to fly these guys in and help our agents live a better life. I mean, Brittany and I started this, we had expectations of just having four agents by the end of the year, we'd be super happy, and it just exploded. And we said, look, we're going to reinvest the money back into these agents lives in their personal development, and a lot of times they've got kids, so they don't want to move, you know, they don't want to have to travel for three to four days and have the leverage to be able to do that and leave their business. So we'd rather just bring the people here and do it somewhere local. So just take two or three hours of their time.

Tracy Hayes  49:15  
You know, if you're listening to this podcast right now, which I know John has a great following, so there probably is a lot. I mean, I think you have to look at that, because you're still, you know, small in the size. You're not Keller Williams, you're not Caldwell Banker or anything like that. Your your momentum, and for you, because you basically, you could you and you and Brittany could have put that $12,000 in your pocket, put in your kids college fund, went and bought yourself a new car or vested or towards a new car, towards a new investment property, but you turn in and obviously saw something in that speaker, and physically brought him here to make that physical impact on your people, versus watching a video or a webinar, physically bring them that just shows. Shows the the your dedication to the success of everyone and impacting that those dollars came directly at you and Brittany's pocket. Yeah, yeah.

Jon Brooks  50:10  
I mean, the company pays for them, but yeah. I mean, we are reinvesting. We don't have recruiters. We don't recruit people. Create content, and if the people, if people are interested, they reach out to us. You'll never see us make a phone call or anything like that, but we bring educational opportunities that you wouldn't be able to get elsewhere, and that is part of the value prop. And we're putting our money back into the agents businesses. We do it in multiple ways. We also help them implement their touch programs. There's something called the focus program. We send out two mailers and two emails and a mailer each month, and we pay for their mailers, and we're we do that ourselves. So I'm investing in your business. Not only I'm investing in your personal

Tracy Hayes  50:44  
development, I'm actually because you're hiring, you expect a certain thing, you're going to help them get to another level. They've already got that groundwork. But the a lot of I think the average brokerage around here would have found some lender, some title company, all the other vendors that support the pay for that speaker to come in and you you went and brought them in.

Jon Brooks  51:05  
Personal I personally feel this is me so like it's a big statement, but I personally feel that, like 99% of brokers do not care a crap about their agents at all, and it's just a business for them to make as much money as possible.

Tracy Hayes  51:18  
They go through the motions to make it look like providing some content, but they're not even evaluating the content. If it's even valuable,

Jon Brooks  51:24  
it's just, oh, say, it's not. We already know it's not. That's why there's so many people moving from place to place, right, right? It's a reflection of leadership's ability to provide value to those people that are in their business, and if they're not providing the value, they're going to dip out.

Tracy Hayes  51:37  
That's one of the number one things I when I talk to people about, you know, what's about their brokerage, all of them think they have top education things. It's like the number one thing. That's why I also say, Well, let's take education off the table, because everyone's gonna tell you their education is provided. But I think if you're looking for is speaking to our audience here, if you're an agent who's not with momentum, and you're, you know, looking around for some matter of fact, I did chat with my wife a little bit about you, aren't you her and her good friend there? You're kind of on their radar screen. They're looking at you, watching what you're doing, you know, to listen what, what John's telling you here, and what, how dedicated him and Brittany are to this success. And these are two brilliant people, really. I mean, it's amazing. I don't know how the two of you guys get in your house every night, because you guys got so much going on. Yeah, not that you have, you have big egos. It's just you have amazing amount of energy coming off. You how you actually, like, can, like, sit in a room together, because I think you're both eight personalities, actually,

Jon Brooks  52:36  
we, we have this whiteboard at home, business through the whiteboard so we can write it down, so you don't have to tell each other what to do. We just put it on the

Tracy Hayes  52:45  
whiteboard and it gets take that idea. I might have to put a whiteboard in my house. We've got

Jon Brooks  52:50  
a lot of tips for a couple teams that you know did not destroy it. We had to do a lot of coaching on it make sure that we don't self destruct. And we never came close to anything like that. But we were like, We want to be proactive. We want to be proactive on

Tracy Hayes  53:02  
Yes, yeah, no doubt. All right, so education, solid. John's putting money into it, serious money bring, obviously, top people in. We talked about following, surrounding yourself by successful people you like going to events. Hopefully you're going to go down and shake hands with Orion sir hand and the people that follow you know his crumbs that are around him, his entourage are at high levels as well, because he's hanging around high people. So even just be in the presence of these people, that's how you like to do it. Consistency is another common theme that I hear from a lot of the top agents. What would you say in your business? What are you doing consistency? And you're not a door knocker, but if you're a door knocker, if that's what you do, great. But what are you doing you think that you and Brittany are doing that is keeping the momentum in momentum? I like that. All right. What is it? What are you consistently doing to just keep that fire going,

Jon Brooks  53:57  
investing in our people and in creating valuable content that will lead to meaningful change. I mean, that's, that's it. I mean, invest in them.

Tracy Hayes  54:05  
That's it. So I'm an agent thinking about, geez, out, you know, they're, they're meeting your minimum scale there for momentum, sure, thinking about coming over and they sit down, and obviously, you're, you know, the agents doing great production, they're not, don't think they know everything. But what? What do you what is the first thing you know, or typically question that you're going that is going to you have you finished question yet? What are you telling them that you're going to add

Jon Brooks  54:31  
to their so? So the first thing that we need to do when you come in is do a strength finder assessment, because I need to know how you operate as a human being in the lens that you see the world. Because if I don't understand that, I'm not gonna be able to communicate with you correctly, and I'm not gonna be able to coach much like, it's like a disc test this. The disc is okay. I go after Strength Finders.

Tracy Hayes  54:52  
Strength Finders is what you use, but, but similar idea, why you're doing that?

Jon Brooks  54:56  
Yeah. So I'm collecting data. So the first data you collect is. Like, who are you? How do you operate? The second piece of data is, what's your track record. So I want to know, what did you do before you got into real estate? When you got into real estate, what was your production? Where were your sales? How much were your sales? I make them send me an Excel spreadsheet with every sale that they've done since the beginning of time. Most people don't have it, which means I automatically know that they don't have an effective touch program. So we start filling in the gap by just finding the data. And then we do a business plan, and we come up with based on your personality, based on what you've done in the past. Here's the top three levers for lead generation that you should be pulling on. And by the way, no, it's not usually online leads. And they take those and we test them. They go out to the marketplace for a week or two, and they test what we talked about, and if there's something that they really enjoy doing because that's what makes you have it be a strength. So there's, there's three E's, it's called ease, excellence and enjoyment. You have to have all three for it to be a strength. Ease means it just comes to you easily. Excellence means you do it better than anybody else, and enjoyment means you just you love doing it like you wouldn't regret doing it when I wake up one morning, like this podcast. So what you would want to do is, if you, if you don't enjoy it, as we all know, if you don't you don't stay consistent with it, no matter what it is, you're never going to have success if you

Tracy Hayes  56:06  
don't have consistency, right? So we don't enjoy it, you're just going to give up some point and some

Jon Brooks  56:10  
little pressure comes against it. Yep. So there's 34 different strengths. There's different ways that those Connect. We match them up with the 21 different lead generation levers and say, start with these three first and try them. Usually, that's enough to get people set off in the right direction interest, and we do that with a business plan, then our next step is we look at their profit and loss, which I can tell you, most people do not do at all, and they don't know how much money they made until the end of the year. And if you're listening to that, we can help. And there's ways that you can save a ton of money, just by having us go over your profit and loss statement with you, and just by you doing that exercise to have the awareness of where does your money actually go? Number one thing I hear from agents and loan officers too, because they're in sales, they go out and spend money on the car, the house that you know, all that kind of stuff. Do you actually know where your money is going? And would you advise someone else to do what you did with your money? So we go and sit down deeply and figure out, like, what is your actual profit goal this year, not volume in units, what is your profit? And then we back into volume units based on what they're what happened to them in the past. So we are doing a full on business plan data and analysis. If I

Tracy Hayes  57:13  
was gonna become a real estate agent, he sold me on that right there, because I don't know, maybe there's someone else doing it, but they ain't preaching it. This is

Jon Brooks  57:21  
what I was doing that was different at my company. Before in the profit conversation was my conversation, and I was pushing it, pushing it, pushing it, and I was heard, but nothing was being done about it. So I had to have our own platform to be able to coach the profit. They didn't understand. Most people do not make as much money as they think, and they they're get, they got the trophy, the bank account zero, and they don't know when their next checks coming in, right? And that that is the norm. And so that's why we call it a false idol, because if they're up here sharing everything that they've done but their bank account zero, then you're modeling off of somebody that's at zero or in debt even worse. And there's nothing wrong with it, right? So we don't judge you for where you're at. We actually want to help you get out of that. And there's a lot of agents that come to momentum. They're like, I'm financially free. Like, I'm getting really close being financially free, because the platform is coaching to that.

Tracy Hayes  58:08  
Where did you get that?

Jon Brooks  58:11  
It came from pain, watching other people struggle with this. So you and it's my skill set, this

Tracy Hayes  58:19  
Britney skill set. Well, she's the accountant, right?

Jon Brooks  58:21  
She's, yeah, we're numbers people. We're in Excel spreadsheets all day. I mean, you please get out of Excel. But the data is tell. The data tells the story. The numbers tell the story. If you want the numbers, there's no story to be told. It's a lie.

Tracy Hayes  58:33  
We're right in an hour. But I want give me an example of someone who you can recall recently that came in, yeah, that took the test. And you said, do these three things, yeah, what was one of the things that they were really good at? And then you just, they just, almost immediately saw, yeah, this wouldn't be the perfect dimension names.

Jon Brooks  58:52  
It's an agent in Gainesville. She was rated the number one agent in Gainesville the year before, she was a big box brokerage and sold about 3.8 million. She came to us and sold 22 million the next year. Next year, holy, she paid off all of her debt, which is over $100,000 and she bought an investment property, cash, and she bought a car cash, and now she's financially free, building a team, and she's gonna be the number one in that market. What was her little thing? And she's not even in our market. So you This is how you can see you can get the value from momentum, not even being

Tracy Hayes  59:21  
St Johns County. Yeah, yeah. So, but when, like, what was her, what was her couple little

Jon Brooks  59:25  
bit so she wasn't doing to be on online leads, because for her marketplace, I mean, my wife and I were buying $70,000 a month of online leads. We understand the lead game like we understand the team and the structure and the margins and all that stuff. We're not teaching anything we would never teach anything we don't haven't done ourselves or really know, because then we're a false idol, right? Oh, if we didn't know, we'd go out and find somebody else that's an expert and bring them in and have them speak to it and make sure that they're valid first. But yes, the first thing that she needed to do, because her price point in her area is not as competitive as our local market. She if she split with a lender and started doing these leads, I mean, her in our hypothesis was correct and. Crushed it. She is so good at providing service that everyone she works with, just like Brittany, started referring her, every person that

Tracy Hayes  1:00:06  
works one online need became multiple deals because of her service,

Jon Brooks  1:00:10  
and now she's turned it off, and she only needed to do it a year and a half to change the trajectory of her whole life. Wow. And now she's all referral

Tracy Hayes  1:00:17  
based from roughly 4 million to 22,000,001 year, one year we have was a lot more transactions, or just getting

Jon Brooks  1:00:24  
into there was more transaction than price point we did all mentionable. Yes, wow, that. She's very scientific too. I mean, she had to put the work in, but she wasn't doing the right things. So what we're good at figuring out is which variables matter for you. Have you tried this? Have you tried that? And if the agents willing

Tracy Hayes  1:00:40  
to do the work, doing this with your your lending side, yeah, yeah. We have the same I'd really like to see

Jon Brooks  1:00:47  
lending is different, and I can explain that, maybe offline, explain to you. I can share what I've learned. I can share what I Okay,

Tracy Hayes  1:00:55  
you share what you learn. Okay, all right, we are, we are right in an hour, I'm gonna, I'm gonna wrap this up. You know, if I'm a new realtor, I'm a realtor right now, I'm like, trying to find out where John is. And let me tell you, that is, I mean, talk about dedicated to your people and that assessment. And I mean that obviously, I'm sure you have other stories, but that Gainesville story is like that. That's like, a that's one. I mean, I can that one there is just, like, so amazing. Just change this. I mean, 4 million to 22, million as a real estate agent, you you're in another zip code

Jon Brooks  1:01:24  
that's becoming the norm, or even an agent that comes in in their x production, and they do the same production The next year, but their profits three times higher, right? So like, who cares about volume and units? Like, who actually matter? It's your net. And then what you do with the net? Are you investing it? Are you building actual cash flowing assets and things like that. All right?

Tracy Hayes  1:01:42  
My these are my call my two minute warning questions at all times more important who you know or what you know, it's who knows what you know? Who knows what you know? That's an interesting answer. Did you practice that one you knew this was coming?

Jon Brooks  1:01:54  
Explain if you know something, but nobody else knows that you know it. It doesn't matter if you know a lot of people, but you know nothing, then it doesn't matter. So it's who knows what you know? So people know that. I know how to help them get profitable in real estate. I like that. So who needs to know that agents that are struggling to be profit? Maybe you're listening to this and you're saying, Look, I really do want to change. It's been too long that I've been at this level, or I'm peeking at my company, or they are rewarding this. The right the wrong things that I noticed that, and I want to be profitable, and you can make a change.

Tracy Hayes  1:02:23  
So just to so agents watching this right now going, man, Whoa, that was high level stuff. They want to sit down with you and Brittany, how, what's the best way for those is to, you know, obviously, get your phone number online, call you, email you or whatever, and set an appointment. Man, yeah, I imagine you guys probably have a list of appointments

Jon Brooks  1:02:41  
we are getting four inquiries a day from people trying to join the company. And then we have a crew of six champions that filter them for cultural purposes. So if you want to apply, you can go to our website and you can say which one, and then they have pre qualification questions, and then you do have to do the Strength Finders. So if you're not interested in personal development, don't don't apply, and we do this on purpose. You're going to jump through hoops because we want to push away the people that aren't really interested and they're just attracted for some reason, affordable. They drag down your organization. We want the high energy growth minded people. And growth minded people love the obstacles. They love it. And so if you see them go through it quickly, then you're like this person, that they're gonna have success in real estate because they have the right mindset.

Tracy Hayes  1:03:24  
What's on you? And Brittany's travel

Jon Brooks  1:03:26  
bucket list. Travel bucket list. We've got a lot of travel coming up. The most exotic place you're going, where you I mean, I want to go back to Hawaii. I want to go back to Mallory, Brittany, and do the road to Hana.

Tracy Hayes  1:03:38  
I've never been Hawaii. My wife said more in the Tahiti and, you know, those Maldives and that kind of thing, yeah. And I want to

Jon Brooks  1:03:44  
go to Galapagos. Brittany probably has different ideas. She wants to go, you know, to some parts of Asia and stuff like that, right?

Tracy Hayes  1:03:51  
Yeah, all right, we're loan officers, so we gotta, we gotta ask you this question, you already know the answer. I already know the answer. What's the number one thing you request of your referral partners, or your obviously, you're obviously, I assume, you refer in house to keep it in your house, to to your own, your own lender, but that that loan officer as part of their employment. I mean, what's the number one thing you requested them

Jon Brooks  1:04:13  
communication, which is what every other because it's the truth. Yeah. I mean, if you don't have somebody that's responsive, then

Tracy Hayes  1:04:20  
that question, I guess people are cheating.

Jon Brooks  1:04:25  
Maybe it's like, what would you other than communication, what would you look for in your loan officer? Because we already know that's going to be the number

Tracy Hayes  1:04:32  
from the our industry. The three things that we want, obviously, close on time is obviously number one. That's basics, basics. The number three thing was actually leads that were referred to us, that are proven looking, we call them and consistently be, you know, at least, you know, once a week touching on those. Because a lot of times the agents aren't, you know, they like, right now, some people like, Oh, we're waiting for this $350,000 house in St John's County. Well, so is everybody else. So they may be in. This thing for months, but to stay in touch with them, keep touching them. For the agent was, is one of the top things you know in obviously, you know, communication through the process being number two, yeah. So we could definitely talk for hours. I appreciate you coming on. Yeah.