Building a Million Dollar Real Estate Team with Chris Watters

My guest today is Chris Watters. Chris is the Founder and CEO of Watters International Realty and he hosts his own show entitled CEO Secrets Podcast. Chris also co-authored the book The Million Dollar Real Estate Team with his business partner, Bradley Pounds. His other ventures, investments, and advisory roles include Mint Title, WHD Investments Inc, WIR Publishing Inc, and #RealDeal.

We start this episode with Chris sharing his background story. Back when he was in college, Chris owned a lawn mowing business and was able to pay his way through college and get a degree in finance. During his senior year, he got interested in real estate, but he was still very young and impatient, so he turned to the oil and gas industry. After the market crashed in 2009, Chris lost his job. That’s when he decided to use his savings and open a restaurant. Unfortunately, with the market being so bad, he wasn’t able to sustain his business in the service industry. So, in 2010 Chris got his broker’s license and started recruiting people to be a part of his team.

Chris then goes on to explain how he was able to recruit new people to his team. He knew, from his own experience, that the first thing a realtor needs is a good lead. But he also knew that this can get pretty expensive. So, he decided to create a co-op fund with other local businesses, and pretty soon he got up to $5,000 per month. This was more than enough to allow Chris to grow his business and his team by using leads. He used leads as value propositions to get agents.

Together we then dive into discussing the importance of building a good team. Chris points out that there are three key things when it comes to building a team. First, you need to know who to recruit and select. Second, you need to know how to actually train people and build a roadmap that will help them be successful. And third, to distinguish between quality and quantity when it comes to leads because not all leads are equal. Once he had answers to these questions, his team grew pretty fast and they netted 1 million dollars in their third year.

Eventually, we discuss Chris’s motive for starting his podcast CEO Secrets. He shares that as a student, he was a part of a number of different organizations that allowed him to come in contact with some amazing and smart people. Chris believes that learning from those people was his biggest shortcut when it comes to his growth. Wanting to share his own journey and help others through his experience, he first co-wrote The Million Dollar Real Estate Team. After he started expanding into other markets, he started to explore coaches outside of real estate and quickly realized that a lot of people in the real estate business think like a salesman, and not as a CEO. This is why he decided to start his own podcast as well as his non-profit masterclass - to teach real estate agents to think like CEOs and make strategic shifts in their business.

Lastly, Chris shares the plethora of different non-profit organizations that he supports (and you can too) through his business, with sales from his book and his amazing 90-day masterclass.

Don’t miss this episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Chris Watters and learn how to build an amazing team, have transformational success, and grow your business!

Notable Quotes:

“I wanted to grow fast and skip all the steps, versus developing my skills as a salesperson.”

Chris Watters

“I wasn't even practicing as a real estate agent, I was just fascinated with the idea of lead generation in the real estate industry.”

Chris Watters

“I was dead broke, sleeping on my girlfriend's red IKEA couch. And being 24 or 25 years old, the only thing I knew at that point was how to prospect on the phone from a sales perspective and the internet lead generation side.”

Chris Watters

“One of the things I needed early in my career, when I didn't sell that many houses and I was dead broke, was money to pay for lead generation.”

Chris Watters

“I used the leads as the value proposition to get agents.”

Chris Watters

“You can generate a lot of really cheap leads but you can burn your salespeople out and they may not even make any money because they have to work 100 leads to close one deal.”

Chris Watters

“We grew super fast. In our third year, we netted a million bucks.”

Chris Watters

“Leads are just oxygen - you can only go so long without leads before you die.”

Mike Simmons

“A lot of people get into real estate and they don't think like a CEO, they think like a salesperson.”

Chris Watters

“It's not to the benefit of a lot of these real estate companies to help you build a big business.”

Chris Watters

“If you just make a couple of tweaks by thinking like a CEO, you're going to be able to have transformational success to take your business to the next level.”