#303 Mail-Right Show:Would You Like Become An Online Lead Machine Processes Are The Key

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Would You Like Become An Online Lead Machine Generator Processes Are The Key

Jess Lenouvel has been a real estate agent for over 13 years and has personally built multiple 7-figure businesses that sold over $300 million of property in under 5 years. Now, she specializes in helping 6-figure and low 7-figure Agents across the US, Canada, and Australia doubles their revenue and profits, without sacrificing lifestyle of freedom while creating real impact.

Robert Newman: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Mail-Right podcast it’s episode number 303. My amazing host just told me we’re meeting with a real estate process. professional is what I’m just going to say for the introduction of the show. Her name is Jess and I’m a little bit trepidatious about her last name. So I’m going to hand it over to you and say if you could give everybody your first and last name and if they want to look you up, that’d be great.

Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, absolutely. So Jess Lenouvel, last name. That’s not my maiden name either, I married into that name, and don’t you worry, everybody butchers it to a certain extent.

Robert Newman: I didn’t, I let you butcher it.

Jess Lenouvel: There you go. There you go. Thanks so much for having me.

Robert Newman: It is, it is lovely, it’s amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, John, and I really appreciate it before I launch into that though. John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to anybody that might be new to the show?

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, that’s great. I’m the founder and CEO of Mail-Right where we build websites for real estate agents. And we offer a lot of additional advice and functionality. with our own in-built CRM, text, and email platform, all built on WordPress. You own your own website. We manage it for you. So if that’s interesting go over to the Mail-Right website,

Robert Newman: Amazing. All right. So, just among many other things, you have a website called the listings lab, and it’s talking about how to grow audience boost, income becomes number one. But in the intro to this particular show, we talked to you about talking about process specifically and you agreed, but that’s not necessarily all that you do alone. So why don’t you, what, in the broadway of us getting into a conversation about processing, why don’t you tell people what your, a little bit about your history and who you are so that we can have, like everybody who’s listening can have a good understanding of who it is that they’re listening to.

Jess Lenouvel: A hundred percent. So, I grew up in the industry, my mom’s been a realtor for 35 years. I started doing her paperwork around 13. So, you know, I’ve been in the industry for a long time when I came out of school at 21, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I got my license just to kind of get my feet wet, see if I liked it ended up selling real estate for about 14 years myself. I built a multiple, multiple seven-figure, very lean team. And then, several years ago I made the switch over to teach agents, how to do what I did. Which was basically not only have, you know, build out a small lean team, build out your systems, your processes, your marketing but also get to a point where you can have that multiple seven-figure incomes and not have to work as hard as most agents do. So a lot of kind of comes down to creating the kind of lifestyle that most people got in the business for in the first place.

Which, you know in my opinion, I think most people get into real estate for three reasons.
They want, unlimited income freedom to be able to set their own schedules and not have to like clock in and clock out and also to be able to help people. I think, you know, the majority of agents out there are to a certain extent, service-driven. So, we really kind of focus on those three things. And a lot of the time what ends up happening is agents get into the business and they actually never achieve most of those things. Most of those three things. So it really kind of comes back down to not only getting them to a point where they have consistent, predictable, growing businesses of inbound business. So they’re not building a business of chasing, but also that, you know, once they’re at a certain point in their business that they’re able to automate leverage create processes and standard operating procedures for their business to create an actual company within their brokerage.

So that they can travel. And, you know, we even have agents in our programs who are in location, independent, you know, running a business in a major city from somewhere like Costa Rica, where their team runs and they’re able to, you know, have those income goals continually being hit, but not even necessarily having to be physically present.

Robert Newman: Gotcha. There is another guest that we had, that you probably know that we had on the show long ago, by the name of Michael Hellickson. Is that, did I get that right, John?

Jonathan Denwood: I haven’t got the website up. I’m sorry I couldn’t confirm that.

Robert Newman: Yeah. Club wealth, Michael Hellickson I actually got it. Right. So I’m extremely excited that I got it right. And he describes real estate careers in like levels like level one, you’re making a hundred and $150,000 a year. And here’s how I describe it. Level one, you’re learning how to sell real estate in general. You’re learning how to go out and sell a home, do the contract, you know, find a couple of new people figure out what your advertising and sales methodology is going to be. And all of that, if you do it well, it gets you to a hundred and $150,000 income.

The next level, which is the much bigger level is, and the medium level is where you figure out how to multiply that, how you do it more efficiently. And then the top level, of course, which is what we’re talking about for those listening to the show is the level where you’ve already got three or $400,000 income. And now it’s time for you to figure out how to start replacing yourself in as many places inside the process, as you possibly can show that you can reclaim your time, which will end up becoming more valuable than your money for most of the people that are in that level. Would you agree, with what I just said?

Jess Lenouvel: Absolutely and I think that there’s like, there’s even within that top level, there’s like mini- levels. So we, we always have agents when once they get to a certain point do an energy audit and then we provide, or we assign values, monetary values to different activities within the business. And we really make sure that that person is not only staying within their zone of genius, the things that they love to do, and that they’re really good at but also over time getting rid of anything that is actually below their hourly rate. And making sure that they’re only focused on high leverage activities. So those thousand dollars an hour plus type activities.

Robert Newman: Gotcha. John, I have, plenty of ways I can go with this, but, so far we have not handed it over to you, so why don’t we do that?

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. What do you know about what’s been on your radar recently? Is there anything that’s in your mind, that’s come up the past couple of weeks where our agent was doing something or didn’t understand or had a process that they could really change quite rapidly and it would make a big difference. That’s come on your radar lately.

Jess Lenouvel: I think that one of the main things that we do with everybody who we work with is right off the bat, we systematize their actual service. So, you know, we create what we call a signature system, an expert methodology, some sort of like a core service package that is repeatable and predictable. And I think that a lot of the time what happens is especially when agents are alone and by themselves initially, they tend to kind of fly by the seat of their pants. Like they know all the things that need to get done and somehow they always end up getting them done. But there’s no actual system to it. So, a lot of the time what ends up happening is it takes a lot more time than it needs to. And also, you know, there are little things that can be adjusted instead of, you know, saying, oh, well I have to spend all afternoon this afternoon. I have to go pick up this deposit, check over there and drop my lockbox over here, and then deliver the check over here and get the receipt back to my office.

You know, in my opinion, I think so many agents are wasting time and wasting energy and things like that when a courier can probably do that for $30. But instead of changing the way that they’re thinking and actually creating a systematized process and some standard operating procedures for each step of the process. The thing that we want to do as we scale is being able to have a system, some automation, and other people within our business, repeat what we do well. So I think part of that is right off the bat, being able to document it. And I think that a lot of the time that that documentation doesn’t happen well, so right off the bat, we need to figure out, and this goes both backend and Marc from a marketing capacity, what is that signature system? That expert methodology?

Because then what we’re able to do is communicate that because from a marketing perspective, most, most of the public also thinks that most agents make it up as we go and fly by the seat of our pants. And so what, they’re- it’s true, right? It’s like, well, I might as well just use my cousin cause she’s going to do exactly the same thing as everyone else is going to do. So, it really comes down to like, are you actually providing a highly valuable systematized service? Is this an actual service package or are you just kind of running around and helping as many people as you can? That makes sense.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh totally, you explained, well, I don’t know if this were that I have a tendency or habit of making words, Jess. I call it [Inaudible 09:56]. You’ve got a service, but you’re [Inaudible 09:59] it

Jess Lenouvel: Yea 100%

Jonathan Denwood: But I’m not absolutely sure if that word absolutely exists.

Jess Lenouvel: Well we are using it.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, so if enough people keep using it, it will exist won’t it Jess?

Jess Lenouvel: I couldn’t agree more that’s how words become words.

Jonathan Denwood: Exactly. And I’m doing my best to make it, to extend the English language. So over to you, Robert.

Robert Newman: So in terms of who it is that you typically talk to because I was trying to level this out because I usually try to explain to our audience who the guest is like where their field of expertise, what kind of real estate professional that impacts? you yourself have been, as you said, either a small team leader or another language like language might be saying that you are a broker. Is that mostly who you’re talking to? Is that mostly who calls you up and says, hey, I need your services? And y then you’re talking about their areas of genius and things like that is that who you’re speaking to most of the-?

Jess Lenouvel: So we have two different levels of just the way that anybody else you’ve got two different kinds of product levels. We’ve got the level of that six-figure agent who wants to create- who basically like they’re not ready for systems and automation and all of those things, what they actually need right now is inbound clients. So sometimes it’s that shift from, okay, I’ve been cold calling and door knocking and flyers and billboards and all of these things. And I want to learn how to be a digital marketer. And I want to learn how to get people to be coming to me. I want to create those relationships at scale. So that’s kind of product number one, which is the listings lab. So that’s that six-figure agent who wants to create the marketing foundations to go to seven figures.

Then we have our seven-figure agent program. That seven-figure agent program is all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about, which is the systems, the automation it’s basically, we have six pillars that we go through to help that agent get to a sustainable, happy seven-figure business. And so we work them through each of these six pillars to make sure that the business is repeatable predictable and over time that we’re able to actually buy them their time back. And I’ll use Justin as an example because he’s someone who has kind of gone through this process very recently. he came into the program doing about 150,000 a year. He probably was really on the low end of like who we normally accept into a program like this, but he was highly coachable.

He came in, he built out the systems, the processes, he has social media, we got all of that really like on point, his digital marketing was all like worked on, we worked on the team, the hiring, the people who he needed to have in each role. He really only wanted to sit in the listing agent seat. So, you know, the buyer agents were built out and trained and, and all of that. And within, within eight months, he went from that 150 to a very solid seven-figure run rate. And he’ll do a million, million and a half with his hands tied behind his back this year, as well as he’s bought so much time back, he’s actually starting a second business.

Jonathan Denwood: We just need to go for a break.

Robert Newman: Okay. Sounds good. ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, everybody who’s in real estate who’s listening to this podcast, stay tuned. We’re going to have some really cool conversations with Jess after the break.

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Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail-Right show. We are in episode 303, we’re talking to a world-class process expert who is going to talk to you about what is necessary to go from earning six figures to seven figures. And if you’re in the seven figures, how to go from small seven figures to maybe doubling or tripling your income and the best part, my personal favorite part about this entire conversation, because the money for me personally, doesn’t move the needle. What moves the needle is getting my time back while still making the money. That to me is 10 times more valuable than the dollars that we’re talking about. That’s just my personal opinion has nothing to do with our guests.

But, Jess so let’s say you, you just gave us a great case study. We’re talking about a young gentleman that was on the low end of being qualified for your program, but you took him on anyway. He went from, I think you said low six figures into seven figures and he started a second business. Right? That’s basically what you said. So let me ask you a quick question. If you were to look inside, we all know we can use big words like process and say that that can recover your time, but it’s a big word. And it evolves like in the example that you just gave the case study, you, you listed eight areas of focus just in like 30 seconds. If I was going to say, I’m making $400,000 as a real estate agent, but I’m working my freaking ass off. And you as a process expert what would be the first broad area of the business that you’d tell that person to look at in order to recover some of their time?

Jess Lenouvel: So that it really depends on the person. Usually what we do is the first thing that we would do is what we call an energy audit, which is every single thing that they’re doing in the day needs to be documented. So we need to figure out where they’re spending their time so that we can figure out where their time’s being wasted. So we do a full energy audit first, we figure out, you know what, like, and then we assign values to each of those tasks. We also figure out what it is that they actually enjoy doing, because my opinion, and like, what I find is if I’m doing something that I’m not very good at. And I don’t like it. it’s going to feel a lot more painful than if I’m doing something that lights me up and gives me joy, and then I’m having a great time doing it.

So, the first thing that we want to do is add a little bit more enjoyment back into the business and get rid of the stuff that they hate doing. But from a time leverage standpoint, we also, and I use this, I got this from Tim Ferriss years and years ago is, do we eliminate it? Do we automate it or do we outsource it? Right. So we always- and that’s the order that we want to go. We want to go through each, each, and every task. Can it be eliminated? Can it be automated? And then can it be outsourced? I think most people in real estate tend to outsource first. The very first thing that they think of is, okay, can I hire somebody to do this for me, instead of really looking at that task and looking at that thing, that’s taking up the time and saying, is there automation, is there a piece of software? Is there a website? Is there, is there a service provider that can do this for me for $150 bucks a month, instead of me trying to pay somebody $5,000 a month or $3,000 a month or whatever to, do this manually.

So the systems, right? Like, so, it’s, you know, what’s the most efficient way for us to get this off your plate right away. then we go, we kind of go through the process of, okay, now does this require, – so now we’ve decided this needs to be outsourced. Does this actually require a certain level of skill? What is that level of skill? Can a virtual assistant do this? Does it actually require an in-house administrator or something like that? And then, you know all of this is about not only buying back the time but also doing it in the least expensive or least costly way.

Robert Newman: Sure. And for those of you who are listening to the show, a name was dropped there very quickly. That was Tim Ferriss. He is the author of a book called the four-hour workweek. and he is probably one of the- he’s, he’s the father of the idea of the new rich, which is an idea that’s really common among millennials and is becoming more common among older generations, which is wealth can be measured in two ways. It can be measured in money. It also can be measured and freedom. And in the world that we live in today, more and more, I frequently, I think people are weighing the concept that wealth is actually freedom of time. And it certainly seems that something that is common in your language, it seems to be something that’s important to you personally, since we opened the show by you saying, hey, you’re moving to The Bahamas. So, it is important to me. I’m one of the new rich where you can, if you gave me a million dollars, but told me I had to work 80 hours a week. no joke I would just say, Nope, take it, keep it. Don’t need it. Don’t want it. What do you think about that, John? Where do you fall?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, there is scientific research that has proven to some extent that any income above $75,000 in the US, the level of happiness that you obtain above that mean figure diminishes quite rapidly. So the idea that if you reached 150,000, or if you reached 250,000, that, you’re going to be twice as happy as when you were earning $75,000 is delusionary, but on the other hand, living in poverty isn’t great either. So I suppose we’re talking about that. Would you agree Jess?

Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. I mean, I think that you know, part of earning more, or having more disposable income only really matters if you have the freedom to do something with it. You know, the way that I define freedom is a little bit different than most people. I see money as a tool to create more freedom. So, you know, my idea of freedom is I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, with whoever I want, wherever I want. Right? Like that’s really like, as my concept of freedom. And I think that it takes a tremendous amount of money to be able to do that. But at the same time, there are different levels of freedom and there are people who just want to be able to spend, you know, you know, instead of working eight hours a day, they want to work four hours a day and they want to be able to spend time with their kids.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I think the [Inaudible] importance, which is very widespread in this industry is that if you don’t get to grips about the process and things escalate, you’re going to burn out quite rapidly, aren’t you?

Jess Lenouvel: And I’ve been there. I mean, the first time I hit seven figures, I did it as a single agent with no team with very little support. And, I remember, you know, my phone ringing, it was a client. I knew it was a client and handing the phone to my husband and crying and telling him that someone else needed to answer the phone. I literally could not answer one more phone call, and kind of losing myself and my business. And I think that that’s one of the main reasons why what we teach and the things that are really important to me is making sure that the success is an all-around success. And it’s not just like, there’s a lot of really like, just like John was saying, there’s a lot of really unhappy, really rich people.

Robert Newman: Oh yeah. Right. I’ve been one of them, one of the most unhappy one of the unhappiest times of my life when I was running one of the largest call centers in the world of its type, and I was making a very healthy income for doing it. I was living in like a $600 a month apartment, and I was making mid-six figures. You would think that I was stoked out of my mind, but I was working seven days a week. I was on call. The owner of the business was literally insane and on medication. And so I was receiving insane phone calls in the middle of the night. And I was like, I was so unhappy that when that job ended, it felt like, the angels were singing you and you would go, we’ll go by that money. I just like, oh my God, it did. That was the, my last final time that I chased anything for money. I’m like never, ever, ever again. And I have not. I’ve honored that. And I’m super proud of myself.

Before we lose our time with you, your, your website identify something that I am very hot on. I’m curious to hear your take on it, but you talk about intimacy a little bit. You have this pie chart and you say relevancy, intimacy, and omnipresence. But one of the things that you say within your little blurb about intimacy, is one of my core principles as both a business owner, a salesperson, a person that has hundreds of real estate clients and I talk about marketing messaging all day long, all the time I talk about it on my blog. What did you mean when you said it? You said on your website, anybody interested can go to the listing lab.com and see what she said. but I want to hear your take in-person while we have you, what your take is on intimacy and an inside marketing messaging and the real estate career professional.

Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. So, I mean, I think that a lot of the messaging that people are using and the way that they’re using marketing in the real estate industry as a whole is a little bit old, right? We tend to, and I learned this too, as like a 20, you know, early 20-year-old brand new agent. I was basically taught how to be like a door-to-door3 used car salesman. It was very pushy. It was very like, look at me, look at me. This is about me. I’m number one, you know, all of those things. And you know what I’ve found, even just from a human psychology standpoint, right? We hear all the time, this cliche of you wants to build know, like, and trust. Now you can’t build know like, and trust, unless you actually create some transparency between you and your audience, you, and the people that you’re trying to connect with.

And this idea of intimacy is actually creating relationships and having people- And some of this actually comes from polarization, right? And being able to attract the people who are actually your people and repel the people who are not your people. And a lot of that comes down to just being vulnerable, being honest, being real about the kind of things that, you know, we use personal content for this. So when I’m talking about personal content, it really comes down to, you know, personal beliefs, personal philosophy, personal story. You can use all the fancy things in the world, but at the end of the day, connection, conversation, and connection are going to be your number one reasons why people choose you. People make decisions emotionally first. And then they back the decision up with logic. You can be the best. You can be the number one agent in your entire market. And if somebody doesn’t like you, they’re not going to work with you

. And so a lot of this comes down to, yes, you need credibility. Yes, you need, you know, you need to be, you need to be credible. You need to have the authority, all of those things. But the missing piece, I think for most agents is that intimacy piece. It’s that connection. It’s the conversation. It’s creating deeper connections with people and it can be done online, right? Relationships are the key to everything-

Robert Newman: How would you do it online? how would you do it?

Jess Lenouvel: So the way that we teach it and the way that I like to do it is through content. And if you’re going to do it on a larger scale, it really comes down to, are you being completely authentic and completely transparent with your audience. Are you talking about not like nobody wants perfection anymore? Perfection is boring. There are a million people out there online trying to pretend like they’re perfect. Their life is perfect. Their business’s perfect. Everything about them is perfect. And there’s no connection that happens that way. Real connection comes from hardships. It comes from shared experiences and it comes from the person who is creating this audience or creating this content, being transparent about the struggles that they’ve had.

One of the things that I launched the listings lab on it, wasn’t a strategy. It was just, it happened to be the way that we did it is entrepreneur magazine wrote an article about me. and, I think the tagline was from domestic violence to, you know, surviving domestic violence, to finding love and building a seven-figure empire. So there was just all like right off the bat, it was well, here’s who I am. And these are what my experiences have been. And it hasn’t all been, you know, perfect and rosy, but, you know, I’ve come out the other side of it. And if you don’t like me because of it. Okay. But if you do then fantastic, let’s connect further.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I can definitely say for myself that I really like you Jess I got a feeling Robert is warmed to you as well. So I think we need to wrap it up, don’t we? And then maybe I have, I think we got enough time, I believe, –

Robert Newman: I’ve got 7 more minutes. [Interposed talking]

Jonathan Denwood: And then you might, and I can end it with our bonus content if you need to disappear.

Robert Newman: Perfect. Beautiful. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for staying tuned. We’ve had this incredibly interesting, relevant conversation with what has been a seven-figure real estate earner, who now has turned a part of her business into a consultancy. And she’s going to teach you how to earn seven figures if you’re not already doing so. And if you are already doing so, but you feel like you’re doing so with too much effort, she would also be a great person to listen to you on this podcast and look up outside of it. So with no further ado, travel over to the Mail-Right video channel on YouTube, it is Mail hyphen, Right. And, we’ll see you there for the bonus content.