Lessons - Why Your Personal Brand Sucks | Andrew Undem - Founder of SURE Group

You've focused on something that I'm a firm believer in and that's branding, self-branding, marketing, social media. I'm looking at this list of things that you've done and places you've been featured in and various publications. Obviously branding is important for both the sure and for yourself. And I apologize for calling you like you know what I didn't mean. I saw a panel speaker, I just figured out he speaks a lot, he must have done all this or twice. No, not going to be invited to a panel once, but it sounded good. Now I have something to aspire to. Listen, like it's, yeah, no, no, listen, you'll, you'll get it eventually. If you keep this up, it doesn't take long for the requests to start coming in and especially now with, with everyone's, you know, everyone's sitting at home right now, unfortunately, but people are having all these virtual conferences and it's very easy to just like I get tons of requests just to chat about this that and the other like and it's a great easy way to build though your brand because some of these organizations that host these events have big followings and whatnot and you don't have to travel, you don't take four hours of your unit, you're just hopping on a Zoom call and you have access to their entire, so you know, that's one thing that I love doing now. But anyways, that's that's the sort of getting off topic. So why are you focusing on building out, you know, your brand and also the brand of the company and why are you so heavy on social media when real estate, which is I think we can agree is a very well obviously it's one of the probably oldest industries that you can, you know, you can think of a lot of these companies, you look at their social media to be quite honest, it sucks, it's just horrible, it's horrifying, what they think is acceptable to post. So, and this is not, there's not so different than a lot of like Fortune 100, Fortune 500, there's very few companies that I find get it and that's why I think it's so interesting that like these startups or even these solar printers or individuals can build a brand for themselves that is equivalent if not more exciting and engaging than what a Fortune 500 entire marketing department can do. So, you know, you're doing this properly and why is that? And speaking about why you see the use for it? Well, you know, the brand is so important if you want to stand out in the crowd of marketplace. And when, you know, the rise of social media happened, and like Gary Vaynerch talked about this a lot, but the playing field just got leveled. Like, you know, Mercedes Ben can make this a beautiful commercial. Well, I have a camera too. My iPhone X Pro and a little bit of editing, I can make something almost as awesome. And once you realize that you can put out super high quality content, now it's not easy and you're going to mess it up. I've made every mistake putting out a video that's known to man at least as far as I can tell. So, you got to fail forward, just throw yourself out there, but the branding is so important because if you don't get attention, if you don't get people to know what you do, why you do it, how you do it, why you might be better, then you're never going to get the chance to even have the conversation. So, there's the old age old thing, marketing or sales, marketing and sales. And they're both equally as important because, you know, hey, salespeople like to say, all sales is the king, sales skills number one, number one. And, you know, I'm kind of in that camp a lot of times. But if you don't have anyone to talk to, if you're not getting opportunities, and you can't market, it doesn't matter how great your mindset is and how great your presentation is, if you can't give it to anybody. The same thing by first of all, like there's there's you got to marry those two together and give them equal amount of energy and effort because if you do, if you aren't good at marketing and we like you said, we spend a ton of time on that. Every time we lift the house for sale, I don't care how low the price range might be. I don't care the location. We do everything full blast all the time. If it's going to have our brand on it, we won't want you to know, you're getting world-class photography, hundreds of HDR pictures that we're going to take down and maybe use the best 34-year 50. We're going to get the drone out and get some aerial footage. We're going to do a video, whether that's me on a green screen explaining the house with, you know, the pictures coming up from the background or me physically at the property, giving you the kind of HDTV. Here's all the things you need to know about the top. You might miss if you just put the pictures. We create all this content and that's very important and let's be honest. That does help sell the seller on you. The only way it's going to help you actually sell the house and deliver on your promise is if you know how to distribute that content. It's got you know that if you put out amazing content all the time and preach into the choir, but for your audience, it's like, and I know you've had some help. I think your girlfriend's like in the game help you know. No, like listen, like even she does, she's into like the whole social media scene. She runs a marketing company with her sister, so she's very much like, you know, like a head first into the whole social media and that's what literally her entire business is. Now it's not my entire business, but it's still, you know, I've been a fan putting them lightly since I saw the opportunity and I saw the ability for like the just the individual to have that kind of reach with like very few marketing dollars. That's what I find so incredible and so the opportunity is right like really really fresh still. So Yeah, I mean it's fertile soil and like if you follow Scott, I was like the book you just put out is going to be awesome. I did order if I wasn't came yet. But this guy's like an amazing influence on like did and it's going to be you have to create the content and everyone kind of has a hard time with that. It's do I look okay? Is what I'm saying good enough? Am I going to be able to impact somebody? Do I need a better guess? And then even if you can cross that bridge and capture this content with some decent audio and video, you have to know how to distribute it. And in my world, that is very important for hyperlocals, real estate hyperlocals. So just answer your question like we weren't so big on branding because we want to be known as the people who do it right the first time get it done. You know, if you think I or not some expense and try higher someone else when you have to list it twice. Go chief and do it twice. Kind of thing. Now one thing I like to pull out of this is like you know your agents how comfortable are they selling like this because I don't see again a lot of brand zwingness. So when they when they join when they join Sure Group, is that sort of like a little bit uncomfortable for somebody that's been selling for you know 20 years 30 years? Yeah, you know, it can be and it's not like we run this Auschwitz camp where it's like you have to do it this way. Yes. We like to grow people on it. And everyone does think a little bit differently. So the way I sell is going to be different the way you sell going to be different than the way you know each agent on our team sells. But what we want to do is we want to give them the canvas and the right tools. Hey, this is available to you. This is at your disposal. And show them a lot of examples like I think that one of the things we've done well at the Sure Sales Group here in Baltimore is we leave from the front. I'm not asking people to do things but I'm not doing all the time myself and it's very often that when you grow a team that the CEO or the these realtors call themselves CEOs all the time I find it hilarious. I'm just a realtor like everyone else. I happen to you know kind of manage some of the deep. But what this managing partner will do will take them to help out and just direct everyone else what to do and just collect. And that's okay for a little bit but this market changes so much and the industry changes so much just like all of our industries. And if you're not sitting at the kitchen tables, eating what you kill, understanding the buyer and selling personas and how they're changing and different technology comes into the marketplace and different disruptors coming. We're going to fall behind. So all we do is try to we're in it every day and we have a weekly meeting and we share. They look this is what works for me like last week I just did a whole presentation on why 2008 crisis is different than this COVID-19 that had all of the charts. And I got like 10 referrals from it. God it was crazy. I blasted it out to my database. I wasn't trying to stone. You think this is why we think this is different. There's a lot more equity equity in homes now. People haven't been borrowing like crazy. The appreciation hasn't been crazy before this. And I just shared that with my team. I said, look you guys should probably consider doing rip off my presentation. Do it yourself. So we do a lot of encouraging but you don't have to do it. But if you're not going to do the behavior that we know leads to assault don't come crying to me that you're not hitting your goals because