Speaker 1 (00:00): What if you could design a system that generates Sphere opportunities for each of your agents, builds team culture and camaraderie, and improves agent retention? You can, and Sadie Callagari, director of coaching and training for the PERNA team, gives you all of the details. From video shoots and model homes to create done for you social media posts to what to say in weekly emails and quarterly call days. Plus, when your team might need a dedicated coaching and training role, how Sadie transitioned from high producing agent into that role, the structure and cadence of their three main agent training programs, and a simple rule to know what training to create and when to update it. Get all that and much more with Sadie Callagari right now on Real Estate Team OS. Speaker 2 (00:47): No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team OS, your guide to starting, growing, and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte. Speaker 1 (01:02): Sadie, I am pretty sure you're the first director of coaching and training I've hosted on this show. Welcome to Real Estate Team OS. Speaker 3 (01:08): Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm one of the few in the country, I think. I don't think there's very many of us. Speaker 1 (01:13): Yeah, so we're going to get a little bit into that role. I mean, before we hit record, we were talking a little bit about how it's not sales, although you've been in sales. Speaker 3 (01:19): Yes. Speaker 1 (01:20): It's not ops, although you've had some ops responsibilities. It's somewhere in between. I mean, it's obviously super useful. You're also a very systems oriented thinker, so we're going to spend a bit of time in that too, but we're going to start where we always do, which is a must-have characteristic of a high-performing team. Speaker 3 (01:38): It's such an interesting question. I think a must-have characteristic of a high-performing team is to be really adaptable. And I'm saying that from a place of somebody who is very detailed, who loves a system, and when a system's working, let's leave it alone. Let's not mess with it. I love clear boundaries and rules. And so it's one of the things that I've learned is the market is always changing. The agent avatar is changing. The lead sources are changing. We are in a very changing business. The needs of the agents are changing. And so I think we need to be adaptable. And when you get to our size, we have a big team. We sometimes say it's like steering this huge ship and turning it. And that can take a lot of time to do and we can't afford to not be a speedboat. And so sometimes we got to just do it and be adaptable and keep it moving. Speaker 3 (02:24): And even when it feels uncomfortable and even when it's awkward and even when my internal self says, "Don't do it. " It's like we have to be able to adapt and move and change and make things better for the people Speaker 1 (02:35): Around us. As a recovering perfectionist, long time recovering perfectionist and slight control freak myself, just based on the way you described yourself a little bit off the top of that, I'm assuming that there's some of that in you as well. How did you become more flexible and adaptable? And I also heard maybe some patience in there as well. Did circumstances force that? Did you become consciously aware of it? How did you learn to let go and kind of go with it a little bit while still keeping handles on situations? Speaker 3 (03:08): I think a couple of different things. One is that we've moved too slow a couple of times, and so we've learned that lesson where I was like, "Oh shoot, we really should have done this a few months ago." Now you're always going to go through that. As a team, when you grow and you scale and you get to be a bigger organization, I have to tell you, Ethan, it's a long-term play for me. I've been on the team with Mike Perna for 10 years now. January 1st, 2026 was 10 years and I've been coaching and training for six of those. And the me that first started six years ago, coaching and training is a very different me than the one that's today. So as you start doing it, as you start learning what the people around you need from you and you start seeing the consequences of those actions, you grow as a person. Speaker 3 (03:52): So it's one of the ways that I've had to grow. My colleague Austin says to me all the time, "Done is better than perfect. Done is better than perfect." It's like a mantra in my head like, "Done is better than perfect and it's going to be okay." And I think it's just something that over a long period of time I've gotten better at. Speaker 1 (04:08): We're going to get into your role in a few minutes. So go ahead and brush that with a general high level stroke, a little bit about how you got into real estate, how you found the PERNA team and that transition from agent to coaching and training. Speaker 3 (04:25): Yeah. So I actually got into real estate. It was really kind of serendipitous in Chicago. So I lived in Chicago for almost 10 years and I went to University of Chicago, got my graduate degree there in history of religion, something I could never use. I mean, I use it every day, but there's no job at the end of that rainbow. Speaker 3 (04:44): And I had been stuck in a library studying for a master's degree for two years and I was like, "I need people in my life. I need people back in my life desperately." So I went and served at a high-end restaurant in Chicago. It was fun. I was on my feet and I told a friend of mine like, "I need something else. I think maybe I'm going to consider real estate." She was a business banker and literally she hung up the phone with me. She was like, "Oh, you'd be good at real estate." She hung up the phone, her phone rang and it was Dave Nimick, who was my first mentor and team leader in Chicago. And he called her and said, "Hey, I'm looking for a real estate agent to join my team. Who do you know? " And she was like, "Well, this is meant to be. Speaker 3 (05:23): " So we connected. Dave was incredible. I worked in Chicago for quite a few years, met my husband in Chicago, whose family's from Michigan. And so if you ever talk to Perna, he'll tell you I moved to Michigan for him. It's a false story, not true. It's on the record now, Mike. I did move for a Mike, my husband's name is Mike, so I moved here for him and I knew I wanted a team. I love the team environment. I'm a team player. I don't like being alone. I don't like the lonely piece of it that can happen. And so I explored all the teams in the area and I really interviewed with everyone and it just felt like a good fit. It was a good fit. I liked Pernai liked the way that he runs his business. I liked his energy and it kind of felt a little bit like a scrappy startup vibe, which I liked. Speaker 3 (06:10): And so I joined as an agent on the team then. My first day on the team was in Michigan. It's like I'm looking outside my window because it's snowing like crazy right now, right? So January snow. It was on a day like this. It was snowing and he goes, "Hey, Sadie, we're door knocking expireds." And I was like, "Okay." I don't have Speaker 1 (06:30): The right apparel for this activity. Speaker 3 (06:31): Yes, yes. So I just jumped right into it. That was my first day. That's how I ended up on the team here. I was agent, primarily a listing agent on the team for about four years and we had some sort of changes on the team. We had grown. We're in that really messy 15 to 20 agent piece, which I actually think is the hardest place to be for a team leader. And Mike said, "I need somebody to train. I can't train any longer. I think you would be good at this. Are you interested?" And so I just jumped in and started doing it and developing systems around it. Here we are. Speaker 1 (07:04): Did you ramp into that? Did you just cut production by 40% and start doing some of that or was it like a full switch? How did you manage that transition? Yeah, Speaker 3 (07:15): No, it was a ramp because I had the year previous, I had done 87 transactions and so I'd done a ton of personal business. So I was busy. So I had to manage that. Luckily we have an ISA team, so they were helpful with helping with some of the follow up as I was coaching and making sure some of my clients got transitioned to other agents who could service them better. And so yeah, it was a little bit of a ramp up. It didn't take too long. I stayed in production for a while. Mike asked me once, "How many agents can you coach?" And I said, "I think five." And he was like, "Great, I'm going to go hire him." So we went and hired him immediately. And I'm like, "Great, no, I have five new agents on my plate." And then he came to me one day and he said, "I need 10. Speaker 3 (07:54): What do you need? How can I get 10?" And I said, "Then I can't be in production anymore." And we needed to talk about working this out and being full-time. And back then, everybody was sitting at my desk. It was very intense. It was one-on-one, right? It was very different. And then we just sort of went from there. Speaker 1 (08:11): I love that that is just a little demonstration of adaptability. Speaker 3 (08:15): Yeah, Speaker 1 (08:16): True. Very true. I don't know what this looks like. I know we need this. I think you'd be good at it. Yes, I think I would be too. Let's figure it out and go through a few iterations. So again, we're going to get into it, but I don't want to miss this. I would love anything you would observe and share with team leaders about your process of interviewing all the teams, maybe a little bit from your perspective, but just stepping back high level, having had that conversation with multiple organizations, obviously without throwing anyone under the bus, we know who wins. What clicked for you and what didn't click for you besides the intuitive sense of, "I like the feeling here. I like Mike. I like the way he presents himself. I like the stage of this organization. It feels like it'd be a good fit for me. Speaker 1 (09:00): " Anything else about that experience of interviewing multiple organizations inside one market that might be helpful to a team leader? Speaker 3 (09:10): It's really interesting. Now keep in mind, this is 10 years ago. I think things have changed a lot since then. Speaker 2 (09:14): Yeah, Speaker 3 (09:15): Good call. And the interesting thing was I had to hunt them down and I didn't have a small amount of production in Chicago. I was a pretty good agent, right? So now to their credit, they didn't know I was moving here, but I was very surprised by how much I had to follow up to get an interview to talk to them. And I think the market was different than the teams, like team agents wasn't quite a thing. So I think most big team leaders and teams right now have it figured out so that if an agent reaches out about joining the team, they're getting contacted eight different times, at least we do, right? So there's no lag there. But that was really interesting to me as an agent. I did sit down because of the production I had done in Chicago and my experience, I did sit down and have lower level leadership-ish conversations. Speaker 3 (10:04): Nobody was like, "We want you to come into the team and be a leader because I didn't have any track record here." But it was sort of, "Hey, this is on the radar in the future." And so I had a couple of those conversations and truthfully, a few of them felt too good to be true. And one thing you'll learn about Perna is like he's just very authentic. It is what it is. And there was another colleague on our team, Mary Jo at the time, and she was amazing and she and I just really connected. She's an incredible human. And so I really connected energy wise there. I'm big into energy, so that made sense for me. But also it just felt really real. This is who we are and we're growing a team and this is what we do. And like, "Hey, come in and watch and just see it. Speaker 3 (10:48): " It wasn't so much formal. Sit down. A bunch of the other interviews had been very formal, very sit down, very, "This is how great we are. This is how great we are. This is why you should join us. This is why you should join us." And that sort of value dump. And some of that I'm a bit skeptical of. So I think we've learned from that in our process is like part of our recruiting process, by the way, and I'm not the recruiter, Austin Patas, our director of sales, he's incredible. We have a team meeting every Tuesday. We usually have like 60, 70 agents at the team meeting. The energy is crazy cool, really good. Big open room, right? And the first thing we do with people who consider joining the team is we say, "Come to a team meeting, see it, experience it, actually feel it. Speaker 3 (11:30): " Instead of sitting in a little office with me in this interview and deciding what you're going to say and me value dumping all over you. Now, do we do a meeting after the team meeting with them and talk to them about the value of the team? Sure, 100%, but it is a really off the cuff authentic experience right from the beginning. And I think that's important. Speaker 1 (11:50): Yeah, 100% it is. I mean, that's why we talk about agent experience and client experience. You can say whatever you want, but how it feels to me, even if I'm not an intuitive person or even an energy person, we all know what feels right to us and it's a lot more than I'm reading the bullet point list of how amazing this opportunity is. Okay, we're about to get into your role, but first I would love for you to characterize the Perna team. You already mentioned a couple things about it. I already got a sense of like a growth path over the past decade that you've been with your organization. But for folks, let's just do like a straight level set, like characterize the Perna team however you like, market size, structure, culture, whatever you want to share. Speaker 3 (12:29): Sure. So we are in the Metro Detroit area. So anybody has referrals in Metro Detroit, we're your people. And so we service like all five counties here. I don't know if you know anything about Detroit, but the city of Detroit had this like mass exodus years ago and they're rebuilding. It's interesting. We do business downtown in the city, but we also mostly work the metro. And so we have a big geographical area. We have a centralized office in Novi, Michigan and we have about 120 agents right now. We're growing. We are amazing at recruiting. So we love to like recruit and get new people in and grow that way. We've had a lot of success that way. And I'll actually just give a little, instead of a bunch of volume and metric and units and whatever, I'll give a little Zillow plug. I'm super proud of it. Speaker 3 (13:12): So Speaker 2 (13:13): They Speaker 3 (13:13): Just transitioned our market to a Zillow enhanced market. So everybody is Zillow preferred now, right? And so we were part of those 30 or so teams that got transitioned over and they've given us targets for the last three months. It's one of the programs I oversee directly, a. K.a. Micromanage every single day. And so our transaction targets and our pre-approval targets, we have doubled for the last four months and we're on track too. We're already hit our target. We're on track to double it again this month. So that's been really exciting and an area of growth for us this year and something we're excited about. Speaker 1 (13:46): That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And that now gives me a second example that I'm going to ask you to kind of break. We're going to do a couple case studies of you developing your system that you micro ... A couple of your systems. One of them is your Sphere program, which helps generate and convert Sphere-based opportunities for agents. The other one, I'd love to talk about how you all got so performant in a relatively new program of getting into Zillow Preferred. But before we do, talk about the role at a high level. And maybe because you've already introduced kind of the transition point, obviously, well, what I heard the way you described it before is that you as a highly productive agent was having a conversation with Mike. Sorry, I'll call him Perna as you do. Speaker 3 (14:28): I call him Purna because my husband's name is Mike. Speaker 1 (14:30): Exactly right. I'm going to follow your Speaker 3 (14:32): Lead. And to make it even worse, my father-in-law's name is also Mike, so my phone is like very distinct categories. We're not texting the wrong person over here. Speaker 1 (14:39): Well, it's good for Brandon if I just keep calling him his name and the name of the team at the same time. Speaker 3 (14:44): Great. Speaker 1 (14:44): Yes. So obviously the intention was to grow. You were in that point where they had outgrown what Mike ... Sorry, what Perna ... I said I was going to do it. What Perna could coach and lead and manage on his own, he obviously needed some help there and it was only going to continue. So from that point, what was the original vision for the role and kind of what is that role today? And then we'll get into a whole bunch of follow-up questions like, why do you think it's not more common? Because I think what anyone watching and listening is going to learn over the next 25, 30 minutes is that they need and want someone building systems and programs. But start like, what was your original vision and how did it shape up to what it is today and what is it today? Speaker 3 (15:29): I think that the reason it's so systematized for us today was just out of need, right? If you're bringing in 20 agents a month, you have to figure out how to manage that. So the original vision of it was we're going to recruit agents because we have all these leads. We have an ISA team. Even back then we had an ISA team. We've always had one. And so we have appointments, we have leads, what are we going to do with them? It's the common team leader problem, right? I love new agents. They're amazing. Even existing agents who've been in the business, when they join your organization, there's certain things. How do I get this to a transaction coordinator? How do I turn this in? I get this appointment on my calendar. What do I do with it? And there can tend to be a lot of questions. Speaker 3 (16:11): And so I think one of the things that happened was that Perna was overwhelmed with all those onesie-twosy questions and thought I need to give them attention, one, which I can't give them right now. And two, I need somebody who can handle these questions for them really easily. And so I started in that role is to help them understand how to use the team and how to use the stuff we had back then and the technology and all that sort of stuff. Also, how to give them attention on what do you do? I just handed you a hundred leads. What do you do with them? What do you say? How do you say it? All of those things. And so it was a lot of one-on-one when I started. I had an office, I don't even have an office now, like a private closed door office now in our general team office. Speaker 3 (16:52): I'm in my home office now, but back then I had one and people would come in and they would sit at my desk pre- COVID and they would do scripting with me and we would walk through their clients and we would walk through what's happening with them and what do I do with this and what do I do with that? And pretty soon I realized it was like really ad hoc. It was like whatever you needed today, but I was the Q&A girl and they weren't really getting the foundation of what they needed. And so one of the first things that we did is I just did a Google Doc and printed it out with a bunch of checklists of like, "Here's what we're going to learn first and then we're going to learn this and then we're going to learn that and here's your turn in form so you don't forget any documents." And then we sort of built from there. Speaker 3 (17:31): And so we've really started from day one with the words. I'm a firm believer in scripting and some people talk about talk tracks and people shouldn't use scripts because it doesn't sound like you. And I think all that's BS because I think when you are nervous and you don't know what to say, it's even worse if somebody says, "Just talk to them." So we give our agents actual words to say and they memorize them and they learn them. And so that was really the foundation and that has continued to this day. And it's like as we ramped up, as we got better at recruiting, as more agents wanted to join the team, it was how do I expand myself so that I can be everything to everyone? So one of the first things I did when COVID hit and we couldn't be in person anymore was I created an online program. Speaker 3 (18:15): We now call it bootcamp and we have multiple, but I started using Kajabi and throwing it in there. And if somebody asked me a question three times, I did a video. That was my rule. Anytime I got a question, three times, I did a video and we just started creating this huge database of videos. And I would pull our morning Zooms that we always recorded and I would say, "Hey, Austin, I need a training on land contract." He'd do a morning Zoom the next day, do a training online contract. I'd pull that Zoom and put it in there. And then I just started top grading and top grading. And then we added our scripts and then it was like, "Hey, people need to know how to use Followup Boston this way and people need to know how to use this system in this way and they need to know how to use their calendar with our ISA team and whatever." And so every time there was a need, now I create videos and I put them in there and they're in a very systematized fashion. Speaker 3 (19:00): So we have bootcamp, which is one week. They learn our buyer presentation. We have an eight point plan to find people homes, not even on the market yet. So they learn that. They learn how to talk to their clients about it and how to use it. They also learn follow-up boss, they learn Wylopo, they learn all the tech, right? Interface turn-in, all that sort of stuff. And they do some role plays with our bootcamp coach, Audrey, and they get script certified on that. And then we have a second bootcamp that's our lead desk because we have a lead desk program. And so money time, a lot of people call it, same thing. And so their bootcamp module two is that. That's another couple of days. And then I run a launch program. So it's eight weeks, it's intensive. If they want to qualify for ISA appointments or Zillow potentially, then they need to go through the launch program. Speaker 3 (19:48): And that's a high focus on activity and accountability and skill. So it really starts with activity and accountability and then it's skill. And are you willing to do the work and are you willing to run the play? Run the play is one of our core values. Are you willing to be the type of person who earns these type of appointments? And then they also get one-on-one a time with me every week, every day it's their direct access to me to learn and grow. And that's not for everybody. That's for a smaller portion of our agents make that commitment. But when they do, then everything opens up, ISA appointments, Zillow, all the things that we have. Speaker 1 (20:23): It's the pre-qualification or it's the qualification. In some of these tracks, you mentioned that you do like hiring new agents, but you also take people who have some experience. Are there separate tracks for those folks? Do some people get to skip out of some stuff? Speaker 3 (20:41): Yes. So we do have an accelerator program for existing agents who have done a certain amount of business. And so they don't have to do some of the things. Some of the things we're like, okay, we already know that you know how to do this. For my new agents who've never shown a house before, part of launch is that they do five either showings or home previews every week because I need them to learn how to open a lockbox and walk through a house and what are you looking for and what's a pop seal on a window? Those sorts of things. But if you're in the accelerator program, I don't need you doing that. You've sold houses, you know how to do all this. So there are certainly things that they are fast tracked on. Speaker 1 (21:18): How do you balance your own time between creating new and checking in and updating? Because I know someone watching or listening to this right now started recording videos like in a dutiful manner for some of the reasons that the Perna team was going through when you all started doing it, but they haven't touched it in like four and a half years. And not only do you look different and sound different, which starts to beg subconscious questions for the people watching it, but then some of the information too might need to be updated or certainly would benefit from being updated. Because when people put systems into place, I think a lot of people like the idea of building something and launching something and creating some excitement and making promises to agents and then delivering and everyone's excited. And then like at some point it's like, we need to rotate the tires and change the oil, but like that's not on the agenda. Speaker 3 (22:13): I hear you there. By the way, I feel that to my core. I think that's the challenge of every team leader, right? Always. I try to be as efficient as possible whenever this happens. And so what that looks like for me is if we're doing a rollout, and I love iterating and doing a rollout, so we have them, right? If there's a rollout, if there's something new that's happening, if there's a replacement of something else, I never do that rollout. I never do that replacement without it being in a place where I can have a recording. I just won't. Because if I know that I've got this rollout and I've got all this stuff that needs to happen and I got to go record the video and I have to re-upload it in there and have to figure out where it goes and da, da, it's just too much time. Speaker 3 (22:53): And so this goes back to what we started with, which is like done is better than perfect and this kills me, but done is better than perfect. A video explaining something is better than the perfect video explaining something. What I find mostly for keeping it updated is that the agents do that for me. And this is what I mean. They will call and have a question. And again, if they call and they have a question three times on it, then I'm like, "That video isn't working. That doesn't make sense. They don't understand it. So let me block off a half an hour and just go redo that so that it makes more sense." And over the years, everything has gotten redone and everything has gotten refreshed. We've had a couple of really big rollouts that have changed our structure and our systems and when that happens, then I really do have to go in and redo five or 10 videos and redo a whole section. Speaker 3 (23:41): And that's okay. At this point, I've been doing them so long that it takes me a couple hours and we're done. And I just talk like I talk on the video. So this is one thing I tell people all the time is if you're training videos, if you're doing a video system like we do, if your training videos are too perfect and too scripted and it's like you're reading my first ones, I was like trying to read a script on a screen and you can see my eyes like moving, they're really bad. But if that's it and it's not you and then they meet you in person, it doesn't work, right? So authenticity is really important. So look, I cuss sometimes. There is cuss words in our training videos. It just is what it is. We're going to be fine with this. We're going to roll with this, right? Speaker 3 (24:22): So don't worry so much about it being perfect. They know that it might be a recording of a team meeting and so the quality's not great, the staging in the background isn't perfect, right? None of that is happening and that's okay. It doesn't matter. And if they come to me and they say, "Hey, this doesn't make any sense." They'll say like, "Hey, this has our old tech tool, whatever it is in it. " And then I'm like, "Oh, okay. I should just go run in and update that. " So at this point it's more replacing here and there and they tell me when it needs replaced. Speaker 1 (24:51): Yeah. I love the three questions as the solution again, but in a different context. That's really Speaker 3 (24:56): Good. Speaker 1 (24:58): And you just set me up for kind of where I wanted to go next anyway, which is, you've been doing this long enough that I assume that you have systems for building systems. Is that true? Speaker 3 (25:08): Yeah. I mean, they might be in my head, but yes, yes, probably. Yeah. Speaker 1 (25:11): Yeah. So I want to go through a couple of examples and we can start with Zillow Preferred. So you get the news that your team is going Zillow preferred and you have these various stakeholders now and you have some new information on the table. I think you were doing market-based pricing before. So there was some familiarity and relationship there, but how did you decide what to make and how did you put it together in order to make the team so performant? Speaker 3 (25:41): One of the superpowers I think I have, and I don't know if somebody was going to hire my role, I might not tell them like, "Go hire an agent." That's not always the right move. And I was an agent and a very high producing agent for a long time. And so one of the benefits that I have is that whenever I look at things, I'm not just understanding the agents and all of that. I'm in their shoes. I know the challenges, I know the concerns, I know what their life looks like. I know if I do this, it's going to affect them in this way because it used to affect me. And so that's really a massive benefit for me. One of the challenges with some people who do systems tends to be ops people I find. And I think one of the biggest challenges with ops people in our world is that they were never a producing agent. Speaker 3 (26:26): And that's what makes them a good ops person, but it's really hard to not have sat in that agent's shoes. And I can foresee the problems and the challenges that other people might not see if they've never done that role. And so that's one of the things I would say. I always approach it from, how can I make this as easy on our agents as possible? How can I make their lives better? How can I get them leveraged? People join a team for leverage. If they wanted to do everything themselves, they'd go do everything themselves. And so I'm always looking at it with that frame and I think that that really helps. I also get a lot of feedback. So I'll go straight to our agents, "Hey, what do you think of this? Is this working? Is this not working?" So I'm not attached to how it's initially rolled out ever. Speaker 3 (27:10): You don't always want to tell them it's coming before it's coming. So I can't get feedback or I can't get opinions ahead of time. But once I roll it, they'll come and tell me, "Hey, this is working. This isn't working. Can we make a change here?" And I am never attached to the initial system and they always iterate real quick at the beginning and they get better and better. The last thing I would say, and one thing I learned from Perna early on is that we are super collaborative. And so one of the things I value the most in our business and the team that we've built is the relationships that we have with other people across the country. And we just know some massively incredible people, right? I love them. They're my favorite people. We love going to conferences, not because there's great information at conferences, although there is. Speaker 3 (27:52): I'm always taking stuff away, but because of the dinners and the connections and the saying hi to somebody. And then it's like, "Hey, we just got Zillow Preferred. What are you doing?" And I probably asked 50 people like, "How do you do it on your team? What are you doing? How do you work this? What's best practice here? What's best practice there?" And I just went and picked everybody's brains. And then I took this from this person and that from this person and I'm always offering to give back in any way that we can, but I appreciate that people are so open and so giving and so sharing across the country. And so I really, for Zillow specifically, I just went and crowdsourced. Everywhere I could find information, I crowdsourced it and then I created something that would work and then I wasn't attached to it and I iterated and changed. Speaker 3 (28:36): Iterated and changed fast in the first couple of weeks. Speaker 1 (28:39): Yeah. So it's alive. I mean, it's a thing that is going to grow and mature. And one of the most gratifying things that happens for me in my seat as someone who puts a lot of his time and energy and attention and thought and care into this show is when someone DMs me or emails me or texts me and says, "Hey, thanks again for having me on. " I've had like six great conversations just in the past three weeks alone for people reaching out. And so that's kind of what we're doing here. I mean, if you can't get to a conference, Sadie would definitely take your input on what's working for you from a preferred perspective. Speaker 3 (29:14): Yes. Anybody has any preferred tips, I am taking them. Speaker 1 (29:17): And likewise, someone who's in your seat, the next market from now, you specifically sourced and learned from a bunch of people and now you could be that person for someone else. Okay. One of the things I love, because we were at an event together recently, so one of the things I loved, it's this SOI program that you built or the Sphere program that you built. What made you say, "I'm going to design something for this and I'm going to execute it and I'm going to bring it to life." And then just go ahead and walk through it however you like. Speaker 3 (29:46): Sure. So the Sphere program is like near and dear to my heart and it came from a need that I identified with the agents. Again, I've been a very busy agent, so I always approach things from that perspective. Perspective. And so we were looking at our lead sources and we were looking at ways that we have appointments and clients and what does the one lead source that every team leader wants more of is sphere, right? Friends and family business. And not just ... Some team leaders I find approach friends and family business like I am the team leader, this is my past client list, this is my sphere. And so we're going to do client events to them. We're going to do emails to them. We're going to do all of this stuff to them. But then my agents have friends and family and I'm going to give them one script. Speaker 3 (30:33): This is my least favorite script in the entire planet, by the way, and I still know it by heart, is who do you know who wants to buy a home? Sell a home or invest in real estate. No one really? What about someone from church or work? I hate that script. And the only thing that we were taught was use this script, call all of your friends and family and ask them for business. And there was something in me that always just hated that. And so it was like, well, we can optimize Pernasphere as much as we can. Absolutely. And even past clients fall into that pretty easily. But I looked at it and said, we have this gold mine of 120 agents and all of their friends and family. And how do we tap into that? Not only how do we tap into that, but then also sort of simultaneously, we were talking about, we had just gone through a massive growth on the team. Speaker 3 (31:24): We had recruited and brought in a bunch of agents and we were thinking about how do we retain them? And so from a retention standpoint, because I think that's a big part of our job. How do we retain them from a retention standpoint is I'm always looking at how do I make their lives easier? Where if they don't have the solution that I've given them, their life is a lot harder. Because if they're plugging in and they're having a partnership with us, that's my responsibility to them. Their responsibility is to do the right thing by clients and to work hard and to have the activity around it. My responsibility is to make their life easier and to get them life by design. And so it just sort of fell together. One day I thought, oh, what if I created social media posts for them? That's how it started. Speaker 3 (32:07): I said, "What if we keep telling them that they should post, but nobody knows what to say. It takes a lot of time to figure it out. I struggle with it. " That's the truth, right? It's like, "Yeah, I know I should post more, but what do I say?" And yada, yada, yada. And so I said, "Well, what if I just did some of the work for them?" So that's how it started. It was very different. It started with me giving them a video to do and some words to put on it and a caption to go with it. So I started giving them that and no one executed. No one. 20 people I think at the time signed up. They were like, "This seems cool. I'm going to do this. " And then nobody did it. And I was like, "What is happening? I did all this work for you and nobody wants to execute." So I just went back and I went, hang on a minute. Speaker 3 (32:52): This doesn't make any sense. And how can I make this better because I know that this is the solution that we could provide for them. And so I went back to Perna and Austin and we talked through it and we create and I said, "Okay, if we're going to get friends and family business, what do we need the agents to do? " Well, what we need them to do is we need them to do 10 to 15 posts a month. They've got to have one every couple of days where they're staying top of mind. And the goal with the post is that their client goes or their friend and family member goes, "Oh, Sadie, yeah, she's a realtor. She's cute." That's it. That's my only goal. It's not to go viral. It's not to get people who don't know you. That's not the goal. The goal is recognition from friends and family. Speaker 3 (33:28): So we've got to figure out a way to do that. The other thing that we need them to do is that we need them to call occasionally. Like I just said, my least favorite script in real estate is the who do you know script, right? And so I said, "I'm not doing that script, but we have these client events all year long that we do anyway. And so if I can do an invitation, that's really powerful." So originally the SOI program started with a call day, every month. It was too much. It was just a lot. We don't have enough events for that. So now it's quarterly, quarterly call day, right? The other thing that we looked at was like, "Hey, let's make sure that we're staying in front of their email as well. Let's get them an email." Same problem. I can tell them to email every single week, but what do they email, right? Speaker 3 (34:09): What words do they use? What do they say? It ends up being a lot of emojis. Sometimes if they do it, it's kind of awkward, right? And so how can we give them an email that's super easy? And then the simultaneous piece of this was like, if we're going to spend this time and this effort, how do we make this a culture piece? Because I think it's really, really important that our teams have culture first and good culture and good moments and good camaraderie. And so I just sort of looked at it and put this whole puzzle together and the SOI program was born. When I announced it, one of the things that I did to roll it, and I didn't tell you this at our event, one of the things I did to roll is I said, "Hey, our core value is run the play. Speaker 3 (34:47): If I hand you an ISA appointment, what do you do? " "Well, you do X, you do Y, you do Z." They knew all the steps and I made them fill it out. We do this first, we do this, second, we do this, right? If I gave you an open house, what do you do to host that open house? Like what are the steps? And they all knew the steps of the open house. If I give you a lead desk shift, what are the steps that you're taking on that lead desk shift? And they all knew all the steps, right? And I looked at the team and then I said, "Okay, so if you want more friends and family business, what do you do? " And it was a bunch of blank faces. And I said, "Hey guys-" Speaker 1 (35:19): You got 50 different answers from 75 different people because 25 of them didn't know what to say. Speaker 3 (35:24): Yes. And most of them didn't know what to say. They were like, "Uh." And so I said, "Hey, this is on me. I've developed a play for you in every pillar of our business, every lead generation pillar of our business, I've developed a play and this one I haven't. And so now I've got one for you and here's what we're going to do. " And I laid it out for them. "You need to do a post every other day. We need to call your SOI once a quarter and invite them to an event. We need to have a weekly email that goes out to your clients. "And then I said," Who feels like I just gave you another full-time job? "And a bunch of hands went up, right? And I said," Hey, what if I could take all of it off your plate for you? Speaker 3 (36:01): Can you make a four-hour commitment once a month? Can you make a four-hour commitment once a quarter? Can you make a 60-second commitment once a week? Can you do those three things? "And the entire room said yes. And I said," If you can make those three commitments for me, I've got the rest. "And so what they do is they show up for four hours once a month, once a month to 40 days. I stretch it as long as I can, but four hours once a month and they do their content day. I'll talk you through what that means. But the content day for the social media posts, four hours once a quarter, they're doing calls or texts to invite to the next client event that we've got. It's never an ask. It's always a give and invitation. And then 60 seconds a week, we actually, our marketing department writes an email from the agent's perspective every single week that's in Followup Boss as a template and it's written as if the agent wrote it. Speaker 3 (36:51): They go on a rotation. So the emails are, one is a city spotlight. We're in a metro, so there's lots of different little cities. So we do a city spotlight. One is things to do. One is a market update and one is a thought leader. So just something happening in the market. Right now it's interest rates. Thought leader's duh going Speaker 1 (37:09): To be- So the 60 seconds is just taking the template, eyeballing it and sending it. Speaker 3 (37:13): So you like click all of your leads. They click their SOI, they click their team provided leads, they click all of them. You just select all email, batch email, you select the template and you press send. It's that easy. I love follow up boss is great. Speaker 1 (37:27): First of all, I love the way that you broke that down. I love the way that you got buy-in. I love the way that you set it up. I love the responsibility that you took. It's no surprise that it was received well. It's an optional program too, correct? Speaker 3 (37:38): Correct. It's optional. The requirement to be in the program is 100 friends and family contacts that we will upload to their fub for them and they have to have all four pieces of contact info. This is the hardest piece for people. I want their name, their physical address, their email address, and their phone number. They have to find all four pieces of info because a lot of people will have a name and an email. And I'm like, "That doesn't do me any good. You don't actually know this person. "So I want all four pieces of contact info for at least a hundred people. Once they have that, then they can opt in. I open it about once a quarter. I don't open it all the time because I like to get people in at once, but that's the only requirement and it's free and I have 47 agents out of our 120 are participating Speaker 1 (38:26): Right now. Cool. Give me the three to five minute take on content day or media day. Speaker 3 (38:33): Content day is really the cultural piece of this. It's amazing. So what I do is I select a new build. I have a relationship with a couple of different builders in our area and shout out to Robertson Brothers and Toll Brothers have both been great lately. So anyways, we use their new builds and I'll coordinate with them and I'll say," Hey, can I come in? "I have enough agents where we do two different days because you can only do about 25 a day. And so they'll come in for four hours and we put together a whole plan for them. So they get a sheet, a worksheet, and it's got a checkbox with a bunch of different videos and we are doing a series of different videos. So the majority of them, I'm doing about 10 to 12 where sound doesn't matter. They are the B-roll, if you've heard it right, B-roll style videos. Speaker 3 (39:19): So sound doesn't matter. I'm doing 10 to 12 of those. And it's like walk over, fluff that pillow, walk out of frame, right? And I always say I'm like a little bit like a cruise ship director, like you and then you and then you. And we have a couple of Osmos that are great and we film with those and everybody does their clips. You want them at least five seconds. This is a little tidbit. I learned from my mistake. I was doing really short videos and my editor was like, " What do I do with this? "So you need at least five, seven second video. But a lot of it's B-roll. Some of it's fun and playful. You've seen the reels going around Instagram or Facebook and they're fun and we're recreating some of those. Some of them are just like, " We'll figure out words for it later. Speaker 3 (40:02): "I do about two scripted videos. The challenge with the scripted videos is that you're asking a room full of 25 real estate agents to be quiet for the other person and they freak out a little bit with the script. So I never do more than two. Two is like three maybe if they're one liners. If they're two, they can be max three lines. If you give more than three lines, they get all confused and they don't want to do it. So I'm giving them those where their sound matters. And then my photographer is at every content day, our in- house photographer on the team. And so she comes in and we also do six to 10 photos for carousels for different types of posts like that. So they're doing six to 10 photos. They're doing two to three sound matters clips and they're doing 10 to 12 sound doesn't matter. Speaker 3 (40:48): And everybody does the same one. And this is often the question people ask me is like, " Ooh, don't the agents hate that? Everybody's doing the same content and it's actually the best thing about it because conformity lowers the pressure. And so if I'm asking just you, Ethan, to do this video and you're doing it by yourself and you're worried about it, and what if it's a flop and I'm the only one posting this, you're going to talk yourself out of it and not do it. It's too intimidating. But if 20 other people are doing it and we all post it and it's silly and it flops, well then everybody flopped and it's fine, right? It totally lowers the pressure on all of this for anybody who's camera shy, anybody who's a little bit nervous, everybody else is doing it and so it's fun and there's energy. Speaker 3 (41:33): And so that's actually really powerful. And then the truth is, is that even in a smaller community, your friends and family are different than my friends and family, are different than Perna's friends and family. So while any real estate agents or anybody on the team sees 20 of the same video, your friends and family who we're targeting only sees one and they just see you and they see you as an expert in whatever's happening. And so a content day is really, really fun. And I get to sit there and I get to say, "Hey, and that's a cute dress and you look great. And what's going on? Oh my gosh, I heard about that client the other day." It gives me four hours. Perna always comes to them too. It gives us four hours to just ... He doesn't do half the videos. He's just there to chit chat, right? Speaker 3 (42:13): I'm always like, "Come on, Mike, come on. " But he's just there to say hi and to get to know people and if he likes one, he does it. But it's a really, really fun culture piece because they're all chatting in the background and they're talking and they're getting together and it takes away all that loneliness that can be real estate sometimes. And if I ask them to do something silly like dancing, like even my guys who are like rolling their eyes in the background are doing it because everybody's doing it and we're all laughing. I have to now. So it's just a really, really, really great day. And then I take all of that content that we filmed on those two, four hour days and I have one VA and she edits. And so she will take my piece of content usually and she will edit all of the pieces of that with the text on screen that I wanted and all of that stuff, right? Speaker 3 (43:03): The audio. I choose the audio, the text on screen and I write the caption, I put them all in Monday. She takes those and then she edits. And so she'll edit mine to the point where it's good and we go back and forth in Slack. "Yes, change this. I like this, don't like that, whatever, whatever." And then once mine is good, she goes and recreates it for all 47 people. And then she schedules, sends emails. So everybody gets their individualized video that's already edited and cut to the right length. They get a link with the audio that we're using for Instagram and Facebook, and then they get the professionally copywritten caption ... Well, professional. I'm calling myself a professional now, but they get my copywritten caption, sales always. They get my copywritten caption and they can copy and paste it. And so they go and they get it that evening, they post it the next morning and they get one of those like every other day. Speaker 3 (43:51): And it's so simple that I always talk about Michael Mayfield. I love him. He's one of our top agents. He's one of our leaders. He's in the SOI program. Twice now, I've had to call him and be like, "Hey, Mayfield, you're another Michael. Your Facebook caption literally has the word caption in it. " So he was copy and pasting so fast and he trusts me so much with the content that he doesn't even read it. He just copies the whole damn thing and paste it. And so I had to have him take the caption out, the word caption. But it's really fun and it's a really amazing culture piece. And then literally all they do is copy and click and post. And now they're all executing and they all post everything and they comment on each other's and they just have a really good time. Speaker 1 (44:34): I love that evolution from, "Hey, I'm going to write some stuff for people. Hey, why aren't they doing anything?" To this idea of like even the detail of ... I mean, obviously having your photographer and a videographer, having a VA do all the editing after one is polished, let's make the other 47, I think you said, which is a thing, but even like using a model home, it's so much ... I love it. It's a really clever design. I hope that someone watching or listening rips it off at least in some of their own way. The thing they're going to run into though is the same thing that agents ran into, which is like, you've given me the blueprint for how to do social, but I still have to do it. So until they have someone on the team that has the capacity to spend the time and the thought and the care and to iterate the way that you have, it's going to be a struggle for folks, but I hope someone takes it and does some of their important- I will tell Speaker 3 (45:28): You this. I do not have a videographer. Our photographers do video that we need to do, Speaker 1 (45:34): But- There you go. Speaker 3 (45:35): Okay. I'm the videographer, so it helps me to help them. Yeah, I just go, but I'm not even that good. We have two Osmos. The Osmos are awesome and they film just like a phone would in the right aspect, right? All I know is how to press play and pause. That's it. But I just set up the shot. Hey, you're going to do this. I do it for them. You're going to do this and then this. And then I go, Hey, go, go line up here, go, go, go. And I'm putting them to your next. So none of this is fancy. The emails are just emails. I don't have some fancy systems- Speaker 1 (46:06): Graphics and- Speaker 3 (46:06): Pool and graphic, whatever. It's not that. Most of it is like B roll with some text on screen and a really good caption because again, my goal is not to approach this like a team leader. Team leaders are team leaders because they're masters at lead generation usually in my experience. That's why they have so many leads they don't know what to do with them. So then they hire the admin, so then they hire the buyer agent. So that's why they're a team leader is because they're really good at attracting leads. Agents plug into your team because they don't want that job. And so don't approach it as if this is ... Like for your YouTube channel as a team leader, it probably needs to be really produced and really good and really scripted and highly edited and with a videographer and all the things, right? Speaker 3 (46:50): For your luxury listing, you better have all of that stuff down. But for the agents, it needs to feel like they did it, but at a high level, or else their friends and family don't trust it. And so truthfully, it's me pressing PlayPlas on an Osmo. That's it. And it's text on screen with an audio and a caption for a lot of it, right? If it's a speaking, it's like really short speaking. If it's a carousel, it's like a picture and then it's going to the next couple of slides that have information on them. But I need to make sure that it feels authentic to the agent like their friends and family think that they did this because if it feels too perfect, too much B-roll of that luxury listing and too much of that, then people start to get skeptical. And my only goal is that their friends and family go, "Oh yeah, Sadie, she's a realtor." So the next time they find someone who wants a realtor, I am top of mind. Speaker 3 (47:42): That's my only goal for the team. Speaker 1 (47:44): Love that. I love that you walked down that kind of authenticity piece and it's not just done is better than perfect. It's like not great is better than perfect. Just straight up like, not great is better than perfect for the credibility piece. Okay. For the sake of time, I'm going to ask you one more question before my three pairs of closing questions. And that is like, you mentioned in the beginning that you knew that a team was right for you. Obviously you've been with a growing team for a decade and in that you've built relationationships with people working in teams across the country. Where are we in the arc of real estate teams Speaker 3 (48:23): Overall? That's a loaded question. Yeah. Speaker 1 (48:26): Any thoughts that come to mind on that? Speaker 3 (48:29): We are moving into a space and I think we've been moving into it for a while. I think we're moving into a space where a team just makes sense for most agents. I think most agents are going to end up joining teams. There's power in the collective, there's power in the leverage that's provided. There's power in not feeling like you're on an island and having teamwork and camaraderie and a third voice for your clients. And there's all these benefits to it. And so I think that if teams approach it, like their agents really truly are their partners and they try to give back and they try to do the right thing by them and whatever, there's no reason why an agent would not want to be on a team, right? Because who doesn't want leverage and all of those things? And just because you join a team doesn't mean you can't create one for yourself in the future, right? Speaker 3 (49:18): We fully anticipate some of our agents are going to decide in the future like, "I want to do this on my own and we hope they succeed and that they do that. " But I do think that we're in a space where everything's moving toward the team. And I also think we're in a space where leads are getting more expensive in general. And so I think that teams have more power there because there's more spend, there's more options, all of that that can happen. And so I think the move toward teams will keep happening.That's my suspicion. And I think sometimes having a bigger team is helpful because you get the big perspectives. I know there's things going around right now with like small teams, like going back to the smaller team and that may work really, really well for some people. I found that when we are a really small team, we were still strapped to like, there's only 10 of us, right? Speaker 3 (50:10): There's not enough bodies to do the work. And one of the really cool things about having a larger team is that there's more perspective and there's more people involved who can help out with things and there's more capacity and there's more experience that can go around, "Hey, I just had this client that just did this and I had this client that did this and everybody's learning from each other." And so the trainer in me, the coach in me loves that piece of it. And so I think that I suspect that this will continue, but I'm certainly not an Speaker 1 (50:42): Expert.That's pretty good. I'm sold. And of course the economies of scale for all of the leverage pieces as well. An eight person team could have a version of Sadie, but they couldn't have a full-time Sadie. Anyway, it's been awesome. I so appreciate your generosity with your time. I love what you built. I'm really glad to have you on before I let you go. I would love for you to tell me one of your very favorite teams to root for besides the Perna team or one of the best teams you've ever been a member of besides the Perna team. Speaker 3 (51:14): Oh, well, the only other team I've been a member of besides the Perna team is Dave Nimick in Chicago, and he really was truly the basis of everything I know. And so I adore Dave to this day. He's such a great guy. And if you're looking in Chicago, Dave's incredible, so call Dave. And so he's one of my favorites just from the very beginning, but we have amazing relationships around the country. We're part of John Cheplack's coaching community and we've made really cool relationships there. And through like Zillow, we were just at Zillow and Locke and talked to a bunch of people and we're just involved in a lot of different communities. And so I don't know that I could pick one. I have lots of favorites and for different reasons. Our community is such a community of giving and that's really, really cool. Speaker 1 (51:57): That's great. I guess I could have qualified too that it doesn't have to be a real estate team, but I'm going to move on to ... Well, I'll go okay. My Speaker 3 (52:04): Brain was real estate. Speaker 1 (52:06): Yeah, yeah. Well, I could probably rephrase it. I usually have to qualify that. Speaker 3 (52:10): Wait, can I give you one? Please. Okay. My favorite non-real estate team, because they just won the national championship for football is Montana State University. We just won after 40 years. By one point in overtime, it was a stressful game. I haven't been up till 11:30 PM in like years and I was up until 11:30 watching it. And so go Bobcats. I'm always a Bobcat. Speaker 1 (52:32): That's awesome. I love that. I feel like I probably saw a clip of the end of that game, probably on Instagram or something. It was like a block field goal or a Ms. Field goal. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Speaker 3 (52:44): It was a great game. It was awesome. And I'm super proud to be a Bobcat this year. Speaker 1 (52:48): Montana State Bobcats. What is one of your most frivolous purchases or what's a cheapskate habit that you hold onto even though you don't need to anymore? Speaker 3 (52:57): I would say I am definitely ... Nobody's accusing me of being a cheap skate. Call my husband and nobody is accusing me of that. So I don't even know what that would be. But frivolous things ... I'm actually originally from Montana. My family has a house in Arizona as well. And so I will spend money on a plane ticket all day long. And those plane tickets are expensive and I don't even care. Take away a lot of things in my life, but you can't take away my plane tickets. Going home to see family and going and traveling around the world and to different countries and different perspectives is my absolute favorite. And so nobody's ever taken away my plane tickets. Speaker 1 (53:34): Love that. And it's another good example. I've had a couple dozen of them in the 150 or so episodes I've done where someone introduces something as frivolous, but it turns out to be really wonderful. Reminds me of like, for example, Levi Rogers. I don't know if you know Levi, but down in San Antonio, he's like, "Yeah, I bought this ranch. I didn't need this ranch." But he goes down there and hunts and hangs out with his kid and I'm like, okay. Speaker 3 (53:57): It's pretty good. I didn't need the ranch. Speaker 1 (53:59): Yeah. Yeah. I'll take it. Okay. Last one. What does it look like for you? What are you doing when you're investing time in learning, growing and developing, or what does it look like? What are you doing when you're investing time in resting, relaxing, and recharging? Speaker 3 (54:13): Okay, great question. So learning, growing, developing. I'm a big reader. I have tons of books and I like reading and keeping my mind sharp that way. I've been very- Is Speaker 1 (54:24): This books fiction, nonfiction, or anything, a mix of everything? How do you approach that? Speaker 3 (54:31): I usually read a couple of fiction for every nonfiction because I think that there's a rest and recharge piece of it too. You and I talked about this a little earlier, but I am a huge fan of crystals and astrology and all of that sort of stuff. So that's been my pet project the last couple years. I've been reading a lot about that and how it affects our lives. And that's been really interesting. That's more of a rest and recharge. For growth, I find community and conversation to be one of the biggest things for growth and just expanding our minds. Sometimes I think we can get in a bit of an echo chamber, especially when you're on a big team, but we're in an echo chamber of our market and our team and our systems and the way that we do things. And it's really important to step outside of that and get different perspectives and what are people working on? Speaker 3 (55:15): What are they challenged with? And often I find in those rooms from a business perspective, it's all the same. We're all challenged at the same thing at the same time. And so then we can collectively come up with solutions. And I love the power of that, of multiple brains and networking and helping each other with that and masterminding around things. And so I think from a growth perspective, that's my favorite thing to do. There's also travel involved to conferences, so sign me up. And then from a rest and recharge, yeah, I do read a lot of fiction. I'm a big reader and I've been learning astrology, which has been kind of fun and the cycles of the moon and the planets and how everything works. And so that's been my pet project for the last couple years. Speaker 1 (55:59): Awesome. Really well done. Thank you for sharing that. If someone has gotten to this point, they may want to learn more about you or about Perna. Where would you send people who've enjoyed this conversation? Speaker 3 (56:09): Yeah. I would love for you to just connect with me on Facebook or Instagram, Sadie Caligari. And I'd love to hear from you and what resonated and what I can help with. So Instagram@sadie.caligary on Facebook, Sadie Caligari, you can find me. There's not very many of us, so I'm pretty easy to find. Speaker 1 (56:24): Cool. Both of those are linked down below if you're wondering about the spelling. It's in the title of this episode, so just look at it. Sadie, I appreciate you so much. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you have a great rest of the week. Speaker 3 (56:35): You too. Thanks, Ethan. Speaker 1 (56:36): Thanks Speaker 2 (56:37): For checking out this episode of Team OS. Get quick insights all the time by checking out Real Estate Team OS on Instagram and on TikTok.