Cyndi Deshaies – Repetitive Learning

Anthony Lamacchia  00:21: All right, my friends, welcome to our Crush It In Real Estate podcast. I am happy and excited to be here with my good friend, and wonderful agent in here at Lamacchia Realty, Cyndi Deshaies. Hello, Cyndi.

Cyndi Deshaies  00:36: Hi Anthony, thank you for having me.

Anthony Lamacchia  00:37: Thank you for coming in to do it. You know, whenever I do these podcasts, I like to have one realtor from outside the company, one realtor from inside the company, because we want to give our audience you know, kind of a broad spectrum of what’s going on. As you know, we sell our training all over North America and we have people that are interested in how our agents feel, what our agents are thinking. That’s from the leader perspective, but then we also have fellow agents that want to know what you’re doing. So, we are sitting here doing this podcast at the very end of April 2021. And as of right now you are how many years in the business?

Cyndi Deshaies  01:12: This is my fourth year. 

Anthony Lamacchia  01:14: This is your fourth that you’re going into? So, at the end of 2020 was your third however, you went full time if I remember correctly at the very end of 2019? Because you came in and met with me in September of 19. I remember like it was yesterday, you drove down. And you said I’m thinking about leaving my job teaching and making the leap and going full time into real estate. And I said Go for it. Because I knew you’d make it happen. So, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about that fear because many of the listeners, I mean, listen where you were in 18 and 19, you know, I was there once. 04, 05 still working in my dad’s business scared to jump in. At some point, you have to take the leap. So, let’s talk about what was going through your head, then what made you take the leap? What changed? You take the floor.

Cyndi Deshaies  02:03: I mean, I was a teacher for 15 years, which I loved, but things were changing. And I also loved doing real estate. And I was doing both jobs part-time. Real Estate part-time teaching full time it was hard. So I took off as soon as I came over here. I think I sold part-time 18 houses my first year.

Anthony Lamacchia  02:20: Yeah, I remember part-time. Well, you’re part-time, that’s the best part of the story.

Cyndi Deshaies  02:25: I didn’t even know anything about at the time about this system. So, I was doing it on my own. It was extremely stressful. And so, I kept thinking about it thinking about and that’s when I called you and said I’d like to meet with you. And when you said yep, I could do it, at first, I was really nervous, and I was like, Okay, I’m gonna give my teaching, you know, my principal, month, month and a half notice. I left December fifth, boom! It was just like, it was crazy. But then we hit COVID and so I got a little scared because I only had one closing at the time. But then when you know, you came on, and you did a zoom call with all of us, and we did the training and when we considered essential workers, I called my buyers. I mean, I kept in contact with my buyers, my sellers, people that I haven’t talked to. So that month that we weren’t working, I constantly was on the phone, writing letters, constantly just keeping up. I did not stop because I was like I’m doing this full time. I had a goal in my mind and I’m very goal-driven. So, if I have a goal, I’m gonna run for it. It doesn’t matter what I do. So as soon as everything was lifted, boom, it was just go go, go, go go. I didn’t miss any trainings that you had, even though we couldn’t be in the office. I didn’t miss any of those videos. Training is huge, all about repetitive learning.

Anthony Lamacchia  03:38: You’re a teacher. How many years were you teaching?

Cyndi Deshaies  03:41: 15 years.

Anthony Lamacchia  03:41: So, you understand. I mean, I want to bang my head against the wall when I hear our new agents say, Oh, I don’t need to go to that training. I already took it. I’m like, you already took it. Great.Take it seven more times.

Cyndi Deshaies  03:51: Exactly right. And before I even became full time you were sending me the videos. So, I’d work on a Wednesday, come home, and I would listen to every single video. My thing is, is I take notes. I take notes because you’re not going to retain everything in one training. You have to keep those notes and then I would refer to them. And then even if it was a repeated training, I’m like, you know I’m gonna listen to it again. Let’s just keep going. Because there’s always something that you miss in a training, there’s always something.

Anthony Lamacchia  04:18: Well, and not to mention the teacher I mean, I’m human, Dave’s human, Mike’s human, Angela and Jackie are human. Sometimes we do a training, and we forget like one part of the story or one part. And then the next time we do it we remember that part and sometimes we don’t do that by accident it’s time of year. Certain times a year, we train things a little bit different than other times a year. And I remember you were constant fixture at training. And I love what you say repetitive learning. You see, I should pick that up because that’s a struggle that I have in teaching agents. As I mentioned, when I get frustrated when they’re like oh, I’ve done this, I’m like navy seals. I mean, they shoot target practice five days a week for 12 years, literally 12 years.

Cyndi Deshaies  04:57: And they are taught the basics from the very beginning to the end every single time. Training, training. Follow it because its what’s going to make you successful.

Anthony Lamacchia  05:09: Now in addition to the training, you also were receiving leads, you’re getting online leads and you were converting them into buyers and now some of them are already becoming sellers? Let’s talk about a lead. Take us through when you were first getting buyer leads what it was like, walk us through the whole trail.

Cyndi Deshaies  05:23: So, we had to learn the script, which I practiced with Dave and McKenzie. And I memorize I even practiced it with Jocelyn, and I was obsessed about that, because your program, I followed it right to the tee and that’s how we get them signed. So, I would just make my phone calls make my dials and I didn’t stop. I would I am the triple dialer. I’m not the double dialer. Yeah, I’m that person that somebody’s screaming at me and I’m like, Oh, I’m so sorry your voicemail didn’t pick up. You know, even though it’d be a pain, they were actually grateful. I signed them up as buyers. And now fast forward. I take one day a week, Anthony that I will call, email, write letters on a Thursday morning. I get up at five o’clock in the morning, and I just start writing things. I start emailing people, I start calling, I’ll do that for probably three hours.

Anthony Lamacchia  06:13: Ahh you never told me this. So that’s your Thursday morning, essentially, ritual. And you’re writing handwritten notes to what? Past clients, current clients?

Cyndi Deshaies  06:26: Past clients, people that I haven’t seen in a long time. I’m a teacher. So I met, and taught two districts. So, I have a group of different teachers. I’ll send them letters. Also, I play softball, I’ll send now my golf. Like I volunteer. Any people that are in my circle. I’ll just send them letters and they love it. They’ll text me like, Oh my god, I haven’t gotten a handwritten note. I’m old school.

Anthony Lamacchia  06:51: People appreciate it. I sent out two handwritten notes this morning and it’s what 11 o’clock right now?

Cyndi Deshaies  06:55: Exactly. Yeah, that’s me. I mean does my hand hurt? Yeah, but you know what? who cares! I do use a lot of the marketing material that we have. A lot of flyers.

Anthony Lamacchia  07:06:  You’ll mail them out?

Cyndi Deshaies  07:09: I’ll just take a drive and I’ll drop off little, you know, little bags to random houses, and they’ll call me and it’s a great conversation piece. And I’m big on Facebook. Social media, I get a lot of my business to that. And it’s not always about real estate. It’s about dogs, it’s about this, it’s about that. And a lot of times when people call me, I always say why did you choose me? And they said, because we follow you on Facebook.

Anthony Lamacchia  07:31: Really? Is this on your business page or personal or both?

Cyndi Deshaies  07:35: But you never liked anything. You don’t comment?

Anthony Lamacchia  07:37: That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t mean I don’t see it.

Cyndi Deshaies  07:41: I said, well, what’s the biggest thing about me? Why did you call me? Because we can trust you. We watch you, you’re honest, you don’t seem like a BS person and we trust you. So, we want you to sell our house.

Anthony Lamacchia  07:53: And the reason for that, Cyndi, is they see the real you. They feel like they get to know you. And you know, that’s what Facebook has done for us. And when I wish we had Facebook when I started in the business back in 04, it didn’t exist. You know, it didn’t exist. I remember myspace. I remember taking a crack at this thing. Stupid, right? But Facebook legit works. And you are using your business page, you’re using your personal page, I see you doing videos, which are brilliant, Videos have a big impact.

Let’s take a quick break and hear from Dave Karoly, the master of objection handling as he teaches you how to overcome buyer and seller concerns.

Dave Karoly  08:29: Alright so for today’s objection, gonna handle when you’re talking to a buyer, you have a really good conversation and they’re just too busy to meet. Right. It’s cool to be busy. So how I handle that one is you kind of feed their ego a little bit. Mr. buyer, I understand. We’re all really busy. But let me ask you how are you searching for homes now? Okay, Zillow, realtor.com. And let me ask, are you searching once a day, searching every day? Okay, and about how much time do you spend when you search? Okay, so you’re searching, you know, every night after work for 15 minutes, a half an hour, do you know that actually adds up to almost 10 hours a month. And I know you’re busy and you’d like those 10 hours back. With our system, you’re not going to have to do all that. You’re going to get priority access to homes that meet and exceed your criteria, some that aren’t even on the market yet, but you’re going to get them in real time. So, we’re going to take all that legwork and give you that you know, 15 minutes to half an hour every night back. How does that sound?

Anthony Lamacchia  09:34: Okay, so I like all of that. You’re talking about training. You’re talking about your lead gen. Now, year to date. I mean, you have how many closed and pending 15, 16, 17

Cyndi Deshaies  09:46: 15 and then I have 5 listings coming on the market.

Anthony Lamacchia  09:48: Five listings coming on the market within the next month? So you got 15 closed and pending five listings coming on the market. You’re gonna make president’s club this year. I know you just missed it last year by two sales. You were so mad. I remember calling you saying relax, you’re gonna get there. It was a tough year. And this year starting off tough to with the inventory, but you’re doing well with the listings. So now that you’re doing this many sales, I mean, it’s a different life, you’re busier, you mentioned services. So, you know, people that are outside Lamacchia, don’t know what that means, but you essentially have some assistance with your transactions. And the point I’m getting at, I don’t want to do a Lamacchia advertisement, but people that are listening from outside should be thinking about how to get themselves some help. So why don’t you talk about some of the things that you have helped with, so that they can understand what they should get some help within their own way.

Cyndi Deshaies  10:38: So, I have a great admin assistant, she takes care of all the paperwork, and I explain that to every buyer or seller that I meet with that I am, my job is to sell your house. My job is not to do the marketing. We have a great marketing team here. They take care of all my marketing. So, my what my job is sell the house or find their house. I will especially for buyers, I’ll dig dig, dig dig. I’ll call people who have houses that they don’t even live in that they’re renting. Digging means calling for sale by owners. I go into the public record that Dave taught us that absentee owners, and then I go right down the list and then I go on and I find a cell phone numbers or the emails, addresses whatever it needs to be. I’ll call them, I’ll email them, and I’ll send them a postcard. Just a quick note, you know.

Anthony Lamacchia  11:24: You’re doing that for your buyers?

Cyndi Deshaies  11:26: Yeah, yeah. I do that for my buyers. And then we also have in our company a prelisting. So, I stock that every day. I go through it, I text them, take a ride by, I’ll reach out to the seller’s agent. If we can get in there great, if we can make a deal of an off-market property so my buyers don’t have to fight out there, then we do it. So I’m constantly always looking for properties.

Anthony Lamacchia  11:49: And that’s why you’ve had at least a handful of off market deals this year.

Cyndi Deshaies  11:53: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Lamacchia  11:54: And, and when you have those, it’s usually you finding a property for your buyer.

Cyndi Deshaies  12:00: Which they are psyched.

Anthony Lamacchia  12:01: Oh, of course, they are.

Cyndi Deshaies  12:02: They are so happy and I you know, they always thank me like, oh, my goodness, you went even further than what you should have been like. I’m like, Hey, listen, this is my job. And that’s why it’s good to have the service that we have. So, what was my job? My job was to dig for buyers. Marketing takes care of my marketing and Amy my admin takes care of the paperwork.

Anthony Lamacchia  12:19: Right. And lately, you’ve even been taking advantage of some of the road services and you know, helping with errands or whatever. Also, partly because you did break your foot.

Cyndi Deshaies  12:29: Yes, two of them.

Anthony Lamacchia  12:30: It was the first time you and I almost had words, because you were trying to tell me I was my temper almost gonna go on. She’s trying to tell me just to give you an understanding of Cyndi. She breaks two of her feet. One’s a fracture, one full blown broken and she’s trying to tell me that she’s going to work essentially the same pace. And this is about four weeks ago. And I ended up hearing through the grapevine that she was, Oh, no, I’m just gonna keep working and doing it. I called her, I said, are you nuts? You’re going to get hurt worse, you’re going to end up in a wheelchair for a long time, when you could just kick back for a few weeks, get better, and get back on your feet. And you took my advice. You didn’t take it happily. But you did. But that is the kind of attitude you have. And I’ll tell you something. That’s why the day that you came into my office and said, should I make the leap? Should I leave my teaching job? I said yes. I do not say yes to everyone. I told you that before. I get people sometimes they come to me and they’re like, Well, do you think and I’m like, I’m not sure this agent is really going to make it happen. And you my friend, I knew would make it happen, cuz that’s what you do. You’re like me, if you see a wall and you’re like, wait, I gotta get through that wall to achieve my objective. You just put your head down, run right through. And I love to see it. So, what else do you think? What other advice could you give to newer agents that are coming into the business right now? Obviously, a tough time there’s no there’s no denying that, or been in the business a few years and maybe their businesses and taken off as well as it should? What advice could you give them? And remember, you’re speaking to a big audience of people across North America that will hear this.

Cyndi Deshaies  13:59: So, I don’t want it to be all about Lamacchia, but I have to say our training is amazing. And what I discovered probably about a year ago is our training is on this app called Kajabi.  So, I tell everybody – listen to it in your ear pods. Just listen to it because there’s so much listen to. And one of them almost didn’t want to sign but I just listened to that video.

Anthony Lamacchia  14:23: Well, you know, the Sell/Buy course we put out what, three weeks ago now and I immediately started hearing stories and you were one of them. I signed up a listing that I wouldn’t have signed had I not done the course. And that was why I went public. Last two Thursday’s ago or whenever that was in the middle of April. And I said I did a training on it. And I said whoever wants to download it you can have it 14 days for free, because I want to help lift inventory. And then you pointed out about getting Kajabi on the phone is like everything happened at once. So, thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. But you know you’re the one doing the work.

Cyndi Deshaies  14:56: Yes, oh yeah. I mean, you know, we get the training, you give us the tools we need to take the tools and we need to utilize them. If we don’t utilize them, we’re not going to be successful. And you know where I came from before, I didn’t have that opportunity. So, I’m grateful for everything that we have here. Take advantage of it. And you know, some people sit and say, well, you got to spend money on this, you need to invest in yourself to be successful. If you don’t pay the money, we’re not going to get to this point. You know what I’m saying? So, to me, it’s worth it. And honestly, with the sales that I’m making, I don’t even notice what I pay out because I’m doing so well. And I know I’m doing well. And I’m just going to keep going, keep going. I know what my goal is to share. And I’m going to make it.

Anthony Lamacchia  15:37: Tell them your goal.

Cyndi Deshaies  15:38: My goal is to sell 35 houses.

Anthony Lamacchia  15:41: Which will get you into President’s Club up in Aruba with us next year. And that would be wonderful. And let me tell you, my friend, I know you’re gonna make it because you have 15 closed and pending and we’re at the end of April. You got five more listings coming on. Plus, it’s going to get easier for your buyers. Are you noticing that it’s getting a little easier in the last few weeks or not yet?

Cyndi Deshaies  15:57: I mean, not for my buyers right now.

Anthony Lamacchia  15:59: A lot of first-time buyers. Yeah, it’s harder for them.

Cyndi Deshaies  16:02: We can’t waive the house inspection on the appraisals. And that’s okay. They’re very patient. They’re not straying away. They’re staying with me. I keep digging for them. And we you know, we looked at a couple off market properties. It didn’t end up working out but that’s okay. I keep telling them it’s gonna come.

Anthony Lamacchia  16:19: Oh, yes, it will. No question. Well, thank you, my friend. I think the biggest thing that you said to new agents is get yourself training. I mean, it sounds to me like that’s

Cyndi Deshaies  16:27: And work your tail off. You gotta work! I mean, I’m up at five o’clock in the morning. You know, I see some people rolling out of bed at 930. I’m like, I’ve already like, done 55 other things and I’m not knocking people who don’t.

Anthony Lamacchia  16:40: No, of course, but it’s true.

Cyndi Deshaies  16:42: I’m a morning person by nine o’clock at night my brain needs to shut down.

Anthony Lamacchia 16:46: Same with me. You know, I’m the same way. And you know, the work part is true. When I look at agents across our company and agents that I’ve coached, you know, the ones that just put the you get as much out of things in life as you put in and you know, you put in a lot. Thank you, my friend. appreciate having you for this interview. Thanks.

Cyndi Deshaies  17:04: Thank you, Anthony.

Thanks for joining us on the agents who Crush It In Real Estate podcast. We hope you’ve learned some valuable takeaways. Be sure to take action and grow your business. You can check out the Episode Notes and more content from the show at CrushitinRE.com/podcast. And if you’d like this episode, and you’d like to hear more stories, please share with others post on social media or leave a rating or review. To catch all the latest from Anthony. You can follow him on Instagram at Crush It In Real Estate on Facebook and YouTube. Thanks again and we’ll see you next time.