Scott Lockhart [00:00:00]:
Communication is something that we all need to improve on. And it is core to what Dan and I do all day, not just in communicating with each other and the team and our customers and all that kind of stuff, but it's really, really core to the product that we sell, too, because the product that we're building is all about how do we create and help people with authentic communication. You can tell when it's inauthentic. That is the majority of the stuff that's out there, the generic stuff that gets pumped into everyone's inboxes. But how do you create authentic communication that actually next with someone and inspire them?

Dan Stewart [00:00:41]:
You are listening to what to say now, a podcast that's dedicated to helping real estate professionals do a better job with communication. And that's important, right? Everything is about communication when it comes to serving clients at a really high level, whether it's growing your business, starting your business, expanding, attracting a team, running a brokerage, growing a massive brand. If you're not communicating effectively, you're not capitalizing on all the conversations you could that lead to more contracts, closings and commissions. So today we're going to lay groundwork that you're going to find very helpful as you work to improve every aspect of the communications inside your business. And we can't do that without my buddy Scott over here. Say hi, Scott.

Scott Lockhart [00:01:33]:
Good idea. Listeners, how's it going?

Dan Stewart [00:01:36]:
Oh, you're hitting us with full Aussie mode. That is like, not even slightly Atlanta. That is 100% Aussie. All right. All right. Very cool. So those of you who don't know Scott, he is the president at a company I founded 14 years ago called Happy Grasshopper, and I hired him in January of 2024 with a very specific purpose. Right.

Dan Stewart [00:02:03]:
It's time, after 14 years of collecting data about what works and what doesn't work, to scale and help as many people as possible. So, Scott, I'm delighted that you've joined Happy Grasshopper, and it's wonderful to have you here today on what to say now.

Scott Lockhart [00:02:21]:
I'm happy to be the very first guest, very first episode. Great.

Dan Stewart [00:02:26]:
Excellent, excellent, excellent. So let's, let's color this a little bit, right. People need to know your background because you're not actually in Australia. You just kind of sound that way. Right. You're in Atlanta, where you live with your wife. Right. And how long have you been in Atlanta now?

Scott Lockhart [00:02:44]:
I've been in Atlanta 20 years. Just about. Been a while. Yes. Yes.

Dan Stewart [00:02:51]:
All right, awesome. So prior to joining Happy Grasshopper, you had a wealth of experience in helping companies scale. And, you know, I know that we always had this rapport and this friendly relationship, and it was really easy when opportunity presented itself for us to align our talents towards a common objective. For context, let's tell the audience a little bit about your background. Give us a quick rundown.

Scott Lockhart [00:03:19]:
Sure. So the 20 years in Atlanta coincides with 20 years, really, in the real estate industry. So I got a job in Atlanta as the chief technology officer of Remax, Greater Atlanta, which was one of the largest brokerages in the country at the time. That I was there for a number of years, really learnt so much about the industry from the brokerage standpoint and especially a mega broker. And, you know, my office was on a hallway that had some of the biggest agents in the country at the time. So I got a very, very fast and quick education there. From there, after successfully creating some lead programs and collaborating with our mortgage partner at the time, kind of came up with a isa methodology to taking leads, of which we made a lot of. We were generating hundreds of thousands of Internet leads at the time per year, and taking those through different opportunities for title and mortgage and all that kind of stuff.

Scott Lockhart [00:04:26]:
I ended up doing that as a fractional CTO, even though that wasn't a term back then. So I was working with that mortgage partner as basically a Linus CTO to help implement these same successful initiatives that some of the other largest customers and joint venture partners around the country. Then I took a small break where I worked in finance and was on the leadership team of the switch from Wakovia to Wells Fargo. That was in the middle of the global financial crisis. Did that for a couple of years, very successfully. Then came back into real estate as a friend of mine had a small IDX company called Showcase IDx. And he was like, hey, no, you used to do real estate, would you be interested? And I was like, nah, I'm good. I don't know, I'm good, but I'll, but I'll consult with you.

Scott Lockhart [00:05:24]:
So eleven years later, I had sold that company to EXP actually, and then EXP later sold that on to Constellation too, so actually sold it twice. So basically through that period, building showcase IDX into a multimillion dollar business with thousands of agent customers and developing our team and culture and communication was always super important to me. So when I was looking around for something new after eleven years, I had a very short chat with Dan. We were like, you think we should? You think we should? I think we might. We could do this. Maybe we should. And here I am, six months in just about. And it's been a great six months.

Dan Stewart [00:06:15]:
Yeah, I think, you know, the first six months of doing anything, there's an adaptation. There's so much to learn. Right. So the reason I'm going to draw this out for everyone is because if you think about whatever objectives it is that you set for yourself in business, the achievement of those objectives, it's much more easily realized through relationship. And, you know, over 14 years that I've been involved in this industry, I've met countless people. And every now and then you meet someone where you just click. You know, there's a synergy there. There's a common set of core beliefs about how things should operate.

Dan Stewart [00:06:57]:
And I think that's what allowed us to click so quickly once you. Once you were available to join us here at happy grasshopper. And I think, quite frankly, as much as we've got done in the past six months, it's just the tiniest drop of water compared to what we have in the works. So, you know, if this is your first episode, tuning into what to say now, which it certainly is as episode number one, although you may be a longtime participant in our webinars or our online intensives, you need to know for sure that the story of Happy Grasshopper is really just beginning. It's a very exciting time for our brand. We're currently serving clients in all 50 states and all throughout Canada, and we now have this enormous data set that we're able to leverage to help you actually have the conversations that you need to have. So that's the what part of what we do. And this episode is really about laying some groundwork to help you, the listener.

Dan Stewart [00:08:06]:
So I want you to think about any sort of communication challenge that you might have in your business. And if you'd like to share those with us, you can just send an email to danappygrasshopper.com and we'll address those on a future episode for sure. You might also join our group. What to say now on Facebook. So facebook.com. what to say now I wanted to circle back to actually way back 14 years ago, when I barely had any gray hair, and I was thinking about starting this little idea of a company. So the genesis of that moment really came from frustrations I'd had at a previous brand. I built a CRM platform that serviced franchise organizations.

Dan Stewart [00:08:59]:
And all those franchise organizations, they knew exactly what they wanted. They told us, we built it. They loved it. That part was fantastic. The problem is that when they rolled it out to their franchisees they kind of went, meh. It just didn't land for them. Right. We'd never talk to them.

Dan Stewart [00:09:19]:
We didn't understand what their needs or their challenges were. We just delivered exactly what our client wants. So if you're an agent at a brand that provides you software today and you're frustrated by it, this is very likely the reason why that software wasn't really made for you. It was made for the franchise, the large organization that's providing it to you. So my thought was, well, what if we turn that around? What if we spent several years serving just the end user? So the first few years of our story, we only focused on agents. And then gradually we added layer upon layer. So the next layer was teams. And today we support some of the largest, most profitable teams in the world.

Dan Stewart [00:10:09]:
It's amazing. Brands like the Robert Slack organization, for example. And then after teams, we added the broker owner layer. Now, these might be franchisees. They could also be independent broker owners. And all across the country, we've helped these broker owners really attracted and recruit the right agents, and then we've helped those agents find more referral opportunity in the databases they already have. So as we come to that last layer here, we've reversed the pyramid. We didn't start at the top and work our way down like with my previous company.

Dan Stewart [00:10:49]:
We started at the bottom and we've worked our way up. And today we feel really privileged to begin the process of working with some of the largest, most successful brands to reliably deliver exactly the right content to really activate the databases of their team owners and their agents. So, Scott, that's kind of a long dissection there of what we do. And I remember having this chat with you, as one does in the real estate world, over cocktails at a bar in New York City at that famous event called Inman Connect. And we found ourselves just really diving into this conversation until the wee hours of the morning. And there was such an alignment and a synergy between our strengths there. So I'd like to ask you to just be bold and honest and open with everyone viewing this today. Now that you're here six months, what are your thoughts about those ambitions, about the sincerity of the commitment of this brand to achieve those objectives?

Scott Lockhart [00:12:04]:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really, really clear. The one thing that really stuck with me is really kind of very motivating, is I always kind of had a passion for communication and, and trying to improve my own communication, communication of the teams that I was on and leading. And I think that seeing this now six months into this, that commitment to doing something that's quite strange and different in the real estate industry, which is not just saying, hey, we have a product that it alone does everything. Like there's really a human aspect to it. That was one of the things that before I started I honestly really didn't appreciate the true value of what the people bring. And of course there's AI coming up and all that kind of stuff, but that stuff still isn't there. But being able to send that right message to the right person at the right time has really, really impressed me a lot and has me motivated in thinking, especially on the product side, like how can we do more and how can we make things better? Because communication at the end of the day is, everything is predicated on that. And it is one of the big opportunities out there that agent brokerages pretty much everyone, even on the vendor side, everyone in the industry and everyone in every industry quite frankly, but especially in real estate really as they get to learn how to communicate better, more opportunities open up because conversations are how we build business.

Scott Lockhart [00:13:57]:
I don't know very many people who can say I've built a successful business by not talking to anyone.

Dan Stewart [00:14:05]:
That's a rare thing. Just thinking about the time that we've both been serving the space, right? And I remember my mother was a real estate agent and I remember the excitement around like the new MLS book, right? There was a day where the agent, the brokerage, the brand, they really had access to, they really had ownership of the data and today that data is really free. It's accessible practically everywhere, as we all know. So the value proposition of the broker has had to change. It's become much more of, hey, these are my listings to, hey, let me help you achieve the success that you're looking for in the market. So just kind of following that evolution we saw a shift from I'm an agent at the brand where the brand was the thing that led to I'm the agent. Right? So personal branding became a thing. Right? The condo Contessa comes to mind.

Dan Stewart [00:15:13]:
Alison Gatty in Austin, Texas. Don Hobbs of Hobbs Herder was super helpful for the industry at that time and really helping agents set themselves apart from the competition. And now with the massive growth in real estate we have, what is it, 1.7 million licensees in the United States around that still.

Scott Lockhart [00:15:37]:
Yeah.

Dan Stewart [00:15:37]:
And the average agent production is like two, three units a year. It's just, it's absolutely abysmal. We've got 75% of all brand new agents quitting in their first year. And fully 87% of all agents fail and drop out of real estate within a five year lifespan from when they started. Like, those are some really steep odds for people to be successful. So, you know, what is it that allows some people to endure? What is it that allows some people to not just get by, but to actually thrive in an environment where so many other people fail? You know, I'd love to hear your thoughts about that, Scott. What do you think it is that sets those people apart?

Scott Lockhart [00:16:27]:
Yeah, I really think that the new agent coming in often just doesn't know what to do. They've gone through a rudimentary kind of, like, real estate score, but then the reality of the industry starts to hit. Underlying all of that is their ability to gain real experience as fast as possible. And it's funny what you said earlier about the role of the brokerage. When I was at Exp, we really saw a lot of our role as being agent enablement. The role had really shifted from where it was, say, 1520 years ago to what are we doing as essentially a platform for agent? So the agents who tend to do better either develop their own or they really invest and embrace a process or a set of processes and a platform that they can use to grow. And often that is, how do they get leads? What do they do with the leads when they get them? And then taking that through and getting the experience of taking someone through the, the home, whether it's listing and on the sell side or on the buy side, how to get through that process the first few times? And one of the things that, in my experience at working at exceedingly large brokerages was how do we get people to a point of success that is a threshold that allows them to be more successful as soon as possible. Right? So how do we get them to their third, like, or fourth transaction within the first, you know, six months? And honestly, like, you're saying most agents don't do that.

Dan Stewart [00:18:16]:
Are we talking about new licensees? Yeah, I have some thoughts about that. Right? That brand new licensee. I mean, gosh, think about this person, right? If you're listening, remember when you were that person, you had all these expectations of how great a real estate career was going to be. You know, maybe you watch million dollar listing and you're like, I'm smarter than that guy. I can do that. It's going to be great. You know, maybe you already had your bentley picked out before you even passed your real estate exam. Who knows? And then, of course, the day after you passed the test.

Dan Stewart [00:18:50]:
You were like, now what? Right? Whoo. Now we got to figure out how to actually generate business. They didn't teach you that in real estate school, right? That's something you've got to figure out. And so I think the first growth plateau for any brand new agent is moving from a place where they're not certain about what they should be doing to where they've chosen a direction that's right to them. Or maybe they've accepted a direction from a team leader or a broker owner, and they're consistently doing the things that will lead to success. That I believe really is the number one divider between those who get to the very highest levels in any career and those who just kind of hope it's going to work out. Right. It's that commitment to consistently doing the things that lead to success day in and day out, whether you feel great, whether you don't feel great, it's that commitment to being consistent, uh, that really works.

Scott Lockhart [00:19:51]:
Well, those small improvements and those small things really do add up. Right. So. And that's been proven time and time again by having a plan, knowing that the plan is probably going to need to change when it's the real world. But being able to adapt that to your situation as a new agent is really, really important. And as agents get tenure and they actually get the experience, you know, the one thing that is clear is that communication is so important, and it's not just even communication with clients and leads, all that kind of stuff. It's how do you communicate with other agents? How do you communicate with your broker? How do you communicate your needs, your clients needs? And, you know, to me, that's. That's one of the things that agents often, and they first get into it.

Scott Lockhart [00:20:46]:
They're like, I can talk to people. I'm doing this because I'm a people person. Right. But still, there's a lot to learn when it comes to that.

Dan Stewart [00:20:57]:
Well, I think once you decide that this is the right career path for you, you pretty quickly come to that realization that clients aren't just going to show up. And so what are the most common things people do to generate business? Right. There's, there's. I like to categorize things, right. This is pretty simple. There's free, which generally requires effort on your part. Right. You could go knock on doors.

Dan Stewart [00:21:22]:
That's free. But you can't have somebody really do that effectively for you. You have to walk. Right. You have to knock on the doors. That's a free thing that anyone can do. Then there's cheap things you could do, like say you're going to host an open house, maybe you'll put some cookies in the oven, right? Maybe you've got the cost and the time of traveling there and putting out your signs or your balloons or marketing the open house on social media. Those are pretty low effort things to do.

Dan Stewart [00:21:56]:
And then you have kind of the mid range cost things. Like for example, your brokerage might provide an IDX website. People could search there, but you're probably not getting very much traffic, right? So you could advertise, you could buy some ads via Google or Facebook or meta, wherever it is you choose to do, you could certainly do that. And then hopefully you get some people that engage there. And then you've got the expensive category of things that you could do. The real estate portals. For example, Zillow has many, many agent clients who are spending upwards of 1012 thousand, $15,000 a month because they're reliably producing opportunity that converts for those agents. Yet you talk to another agent and they'll say, nope, tried it, didn't work.

Dan Stewart [00:22:54]:
There's a variance between what Zillow is in your market and what Zillow is in another market, and that holds true for Realtor.com or any real lead provider. So, you know, thinking about the free things, the medium expense things, and then the things that require a larger investment, that newer agent has to really ask themselves, well, what is it that I can afford to do, right? And I think more importantly, what is it I'm willing to do? Because if your plan for success includes doing things you're not really willing to consistently do, you're going to fail and you'll hate yourself for that. I may want, I mean, I may want washboard abs, right? I may want them, but if I hate sit ups and hate eating, well, I'm never going to have them. I need to have a different goal if I'm not willing to do the things that lead to success.

Scott Lockhart [00:23:53]:
I don't think that this is isolated to brand new agency. I think agents, just like in any career path or journey, when you think about it, there's points at which you plateau. Some stuff works for a while. You get to a point where it doesn't work anymore. You have to adapt. So what you're talking about there really has a lot of consequence at various points throughout kind of the growth of a real estate professional. Whether they're on a brokerage state, it doesn't matter what they're doing, right? So that's always been fascinating to me. In terms of how those building blocks go together, how they're cumulative.

Scott Lockhart [00:24:37]:
And I do think that the, like, a key thing that you mentioned there was the consistency. It's like doing doesn't always have to be big things, but doing small things consistently and how they do add up.

Dan Stewart [00:24:48]:
Yeah.

Scott Lockhart [00:24:49]:
Because you can hate.

Dan Stewart [00:24:50]:
I think, as my friend Jared James would say, consistency is undefeated. It just is. Right? I mean, it just absolutely is. There's something we do with our new employees here that I think is a pretty good. Pretty good way to describe that, right? Despite someone's experience, despite their talents, whatever great stuff they've done in the past, when they're first learning their new role at a company, particularly our company, I always say you do not have permission to be creative until you're consistent. Let's just forget about. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You need to learn to roll it right.

Dan Stewart [00:25:32]:
And this is maybe one of the things I most love about real estate is that no one has to invent how to be wildly successful at it. There's so many examples you can just observe of how people are absolutely crushing it. So whether you're a brand new agent, you're a member of a team, you're a team owner, you're a broker owner, you're an executive at a brand, you can observe exactly how people have achieved the sorts of things you'd like to, and you can model your actions accordingly. You can't expect to do the wrong things and end up with the right result. You have to do the right things in the right order to get the right result.

Scott Lockhart [00:26:14]:
So, and I think the through line through that is one of those disciplines that you need to master is, you know, on the communication side, you know, it's. You don't see too many very successful people in any industry. Well, most industry, you can have some very successful people who don't like to talk. But like in real estate, definitely you take a look at the most successful people in any measure of success. They're typically very good communicators, and they put a value on developing their skills as well. Right.

Dan Stewart [00:27:03]:
Well, so you said something that's very interesting, right? Because I think all of us go, well, you know, I kind of am who I am. Like, I have a set of skills. Some people are tall, some people aren't. Some people are great at math, some people aren't. And it can really feel like, oh, maybe I just don't have necessarily what it takes to achieve at a particular level. And when you mentioned that, you know, some people are just great communications communicators. I really want to emphasize and underline for everyone that no one is born a great communicator.

Scott Lockhart [00:27:35]:
Not at all.

Dan Stewart [00:27:36]:
It's a skill that must be developed over time, and that's exactly what this podcast is for. We're going to completely reveal all the things you need to understand to communicate at a very high level. And we're going to cover this in a few different ways. So as a listener of what to say now, whenever you have a communication issue, share it with us. Tell us about what the challenge is. Oh my God, I just saw that a past client from ten years ago, their spouse died. I want to reach out. I feel so bad, but they're going to feel like, oh, I'm just praying on them to get their house sold.

Dan Stewart [00:28:14]:
Whatever scenario you can imagine, I want you to share those with us here at what to say now and we'll teach you how to respond. Right. We're going to have a portion of every episode dedicated to solving a common communication challenge that people face in their business. Then we're also going to provide frameworks. I think framework is such an important part of having consistency in your business, because if you're trying to figure out what to do, you're behind. It's just, it costs you too much time. You can't reinvent how to do what needs to be done. You have to have a framework that allows it to be done efficiently.

Dan Stewart [00:28:58]:
So we'll be teaching you frameworks that you can install in your business and just rely on repeatedly.

Scott Lockhart [00:29:04]:
So, yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, really learning and education is really the discipline of letting other people make the mistakes for you and learning from their experience. And when you think about it that way, it becomes a very, very powerful motivator to learn more and to use other people's experience so you don't have to go through making those mistakes yourself. It's interesting, one of the things you mentioned there was like how communication is a learned skill. I consider myself terribly shy as a little kid, and that extended, you know, through my early business days. One of my greatest mentors I had was actually at Remax graduate Atlanta, the CEO there. And he, I would get up in front of the board, I'd talk, he's like, oh, you need some work. Like they said, he actually sent me off to improv classes. I did three levels of improv and actually ended up really loving improv to really get better at thinking on my feet.

Scott Lockhart [00:30:13]:
And it did that. I've taken so many courses over the years to get way better at expressing myself succinctly and really connecting with people, learning how to actively listen. And I think it's really cool when we were talking about the what to say now podcast and what are we going to do? How can we create a bunch of value for people? I mean, communication is something that we all need to improve on, and it is core to what Dan and I do all day, not just in communicating with each other and the team and our customers and all that kind of stuff, but it's really, really core to the product that we sell, too, because the product that we're building is all about how do we create and help people with authentic communication. And you can tell when it's inauthentic. That is the majority of the stuff out there, the generic stuff that gets pumped into everyone's inboxes and now text message inboxes and all this kind of stuff. But how do you create authentic communication that actually connects with someone that actually really gets them thinking the way that you would like, thinking about the things you'd like them to think about, even, and inspire them? So that's, you know, when we were looking at, you know, doing this and what this can grow to, this seemed to be so obvious.

Dan Stewart [00:31:49]:
Well, I'm glad to collaborate with you on this project, for sure. I think we're going to get a lot of really great things done here in the coming weeks. And again, I want to challenge you, whoever is listening to this right now, think about the communication challenges you have and then ask us for help. I'm going to give you an example here from my personal life. I remember many, many years ago when I was a young father. Our little girl Zoe was just so easy to raise. I mean, gosh, it was time for bed. She was happy to put on her pajamas.

Dan Stewart [00:32:26]:
There was never a complaint about that. It was easy. And then Ben came along and everything was like a struggle, you know, why won't he just put his pajamas on? It's so frustrating. Just put on your freaking PJ's, man. Let's go to bed, right? We got to do these things. And I remember having a chat with Patty Hypesen, who was my manager at my last corporate job before I came self employed. And she was a mom, she had already raised children. And I was talking to her about this, and she goes, well, Dan, why don't you do this tonight when it's time for Ben to go to bed? Why don't you bring two sets of pajamas to him and say, hey, Ben, which pair would you like to wear to bed tonight? You choose.

Dan Stewart [00:33:12]:
That's such a different paradigm than, oh, it's time to go to bed. Let's get dressed, put your pajamas on. Such a different paradigm. Even with a child, effective communication makes all the difference between that frustrating nighttime experience and just, oh, I want to wear those. Yeah. Yay. Because really, what he needed in that moment was to feel empowered that he had a choice. Bed was nothing, a negotiable thing, but what he wore to bed certainly was right.

Dan Stewart [00:33:43]:
So just one small example of how having these insights can make everything else easier and more obvious. So every episode will be breaking down a simple communication framework that you'll be able to apply in your business. And, you know, I would encourage you go to happygrasshopper.com, where you'll see there's a place you can subscribe to. What to say now. We'll be sending you an email digest of each episode, as well as a link to where you can listen to the podcast. I'd encourage you to go to facebook.com what to say now, where we'll also be publishing resources here from this project. So that's a great place to post your communication questions. And who knows, we might even invite you to appear on a future episode.

Dan Stewart [00:34:31]:
So thank you very much for your time and attention. And Scott, thank you for helping us launch this very important project.

Scott Lockhart [00:34:38]:
Of course. My pleasure. I'm looking forward to listening to all the episodes to come. They're going to be great.

Dan Stewart [00:34:46]:
All right, awesome. Well, have a great day, everybody. Go communicate with someone. Be good. Bye.