Ruth here. Welcome back to my channel. Um, I want to welcome Joe Rosen, my co-host here on the zero to diamond talk show and also our guest, Ben Steven up here. Good to be here guys. Appreciate it. Hey everyone. How you doing? Happy Tuesday. Yeah, for sure. So I wanted to bring Ben on here cause Ben is a long time follower and he's had a lot of success with the zero diamond program. He adapted the circle prospecting strip for door knocking. So are you still door knocking, Ben? Yes, I am, but it's it's starting to get cold up here in Michigan. So I literally just got back on red X today. Okay. So I got the $189 package. They, uh, did the, did the cyber Monday deal for me. He said, this is literally the last one I'm doing. I said, good. I got in on it. Um, but I got the geo leads, the expireds, fizz bows, and the single line dialer. Just okay. Okay. When it gets to like 40 degrees, I'll be knocking. That's warm enough. And then if it drops below that, I'll just be calling. Right.  Yeah. That's what I did last year. I had, and he said, well, I see you were a client last year and I told him exactly what I do. I go, I'm almost exclusively doors.  He goes, whatever works. Dude, that works out for you, man. Like you can cancel in the spring and then sign up on cyber Monday and get it going again every year. Every time. Every time. So yeah. So it's good. It's good. I'm excited to start calling again. Yeah. No, I think that's awesome that you flip it back and forth. It probably gives you a fresh look. Yeah. No, absolutely it does. So tell me, tell me, give me some numbers like this year to last year. It's great. It's crazy, dude. It's, it's crazy. So I have a bunch of numbers here, but so far I've closed 34 this year. Now I'll just, I'll say, I ain't no Quintavius Quintavius. Oh, that he is a, he is a man. He's the man is a stud.  I've listened to his interview twice and it impressed me both times. But 35 closed with two pending right now in December. One's on a little duplex for 174 and I got a whopper. My biggest one closing on the 27th for 1.299 million. And I have stories about both of those we can come back to. Volume year to date from January 1, 2019, 7,415,598. And after those two close, I'll be at 8,888,598. So the first year was 400,000 closed and this year eight, almost just under 10, 8 million. So this is the second year, right? Second year. You went from 400,000 your first year. Love it. To over 8 million your second year. Yes. And I knocked on and I don't even know how many phone calls I made, but just under $4,000 probably to give you guys some perspective. I'm always curious what type of markets all the agents that you talk to are in. My market's around 10,000 people and kind of Chicago's playground on the coast of Lake Michigan. So not a big population, not like a Texas where there's influx of people or, you know, just not a huge market. Right, right. So there's no lack. There's no lack. I'm just saying it's small and I've talked to a lot of these homeowners. So like what what is the population? St. Joe is 83 and Stevensville City that I think that it's off slightly, but it's saying 1,135. So right around 10,000. It's small. Right. So OK, so so you had a 1,600% increase in business over the past year, huh? Yes, I have six active listings right now, two contingent offers. I'm starting to notice there's more contingent offers coming into play in this market, in my market, 320 to 340 and above is starting to slow down quite a bit. Three listings coming up in December and January and one listing appointment tomorrow and one today. And then I got and then I got Red X. So those are my cliff notes that I wanted to tell you. But it's been it's been crazy. You know, it's been a marked improvement, obviously. Yeah, nice, nice. So if you guys want to call in and ask me, Ben or Joe, a question, put your phone numbers in, I'll call you into the show. You know, I want to talk door knocking because, you know, that's something that a lot of agents do. There's also the debate, you know, what's better door knocking or or phone calls.  But if you're listening to this on a podcast afterwards or the replay of this, we do this show every week. It's a call in show. Me and Joe, we're going to be here maybe with a guest every week, maybe just me and Joe talking about a subject. But we want you guys to call in, put your numbers in so so we can get some feedback and some different opinions. And, you know, hear what you think about different subjects and and everything real estate, sales, success, motivation related. But Joe, what do you think about like, have you ever door knocked? Oh, yeah, I don't door knock here in Florida because it was part of my plan to door knock and I got here and there's so many doggone HOAs that it was tough to get inside of them. When you get inside of them, you can't solicit. So I just switched up my plan.  So I went that route and I cold called before I met you. And I just I don't mind it. You know, I love the grind. I love having something that's consistent. It's quick. It's efficient. And, you know, I don't mean to get ahead of it here, but I know your big topic is or one big question that we're asking here is, you know, which which is better door knocking or cold calling? I would throw out there. It really depends on your personality, right? Different people are going to have different personalities. And, you know, I think if you're spending time even thinking about it, you've already wasted too much time. I just pick one and do it, man, and track it for six months and then do the other one for six months and see what's better. And you're going to know better than Ricky and I and Ben together. Just just shut up and like, just do it, man. Be like Quintavius and do just do both rock star. There's no excuses. If you're if you're on the fence about either one, just screw it and do both. Just exactly. I love that.  Period. You know, don't worry about the results. Just stay busy, you know, talking to people and see what you can do to help people like I think that like I believe that circle prospecting is more efficient, but that's all I've ever done. I think that, you know, there's something to be said for the face to face interaction to that might go a little deeper than on the phone.  Maybe you can get just as deep on the phone as you could face to face. There's so many different factors and I think it's just different for everybody. What I'm noticing too is I'm getting calls. I do that bio letter and I shared that bio letter last time I was on the show, but that bio letter is super personal and it gives like a quick, quick history, like a super quick elevator pitch on my life and why I'm in real estate. And I think that resonates with people. And I don't know if I can get that through on a on a minute phone call. So Pete, I just, I'm excited to know that there's a lot of these bio letters out there in, in my market. I know some people probably threw it right away in the trash can, but I know it's in some people's file folders and all those seeds have been coming to fruition the last year. Right, right. Do you have a bio letter? Do I have a bio letter? Yeah.  That's my logo. You don't need one. You don't need one. It just works for me and it gets people to know me without knowing me because I have such a, I don't have time to get to know people other than a smile and say hi or a phone call, smile and hi, you know? So they get to know me a little bit. Ben, I'm crunching the numbers in my head. If you've got roughly 10,000 people in your area and you say you door knocked on 4,000 homes and there's two and a half people per house and I'm not at every single door. Not quite. No, not quite. I still have pockets that I need to hit. OK, but that's impressive, man. I'm running out of doors. Thank you. It's a problem. It's not easy. Yeah, definitely not easy. Just what you just got to do it. Yeah, you know, can I tell the story about the the 174 pending and the million dollar sale? Yeah, yeah. And guys, while he's telling the story, if you have questions for me, Ben or Joe, put your phone number in. I'll call you in. So I was knocking in Stevensville one day, probably around the price point of 190 to 240. It's a good price point in my area. They sell quick. This lady answered the door and she wasn't skeptical. She was a little skeptical, but she said she just looked at me up and down and said, you know anything about 1031s? I go, no, ma'am, I don't. I've never done a 1031. She goes, you knew? I go, yeah, relatively a year and a half. I knocked on this gal's door six months ago and she goes, no, we want somebody that's got some 1031 exchange experience. And I said, OK, I referred. I said, well, I'll try to get the business for the office. So I referred a couple agents in the office tour. She held on to my my card and my bio letter. And lo and behold, I meet her at an open house last month that I'm hosting. Unfortunately, that open house had to or excuse me, that listing had to withdraw. But I met her and she goes, did you go? Did you go look up 1031s? I go, I remember you. I knocked on your door about six months ago. She's like, yes, you did. She goes, I have your business card on my keyboard. And I did research some 1031s and now she's under contract with two properties. We just closed on one and now we're closing on this one. She needed to disperse those funds. And so that one came to fruition in kind of a roundabout way. And then the million dollar sale, the 1299. I was door knocking a neighborhood and it happened to be my my kid's pediatrician. So I knocked on her door. She came out and I go, I'm not going to give you the normal pitch. I said, if you need anything, let me know. And they're like, we've been looking for about a year. I said, let me know if you need anything. I'm almost a hundred percent sure they would have put in an offer just with the listing agent on any of the properties. But since I reached out and made that connection, we went under contract on that one. So all those were off a door knocking. Wow. Yeah, and that's the biggest one to date. That's incredible. So what's your what's your weekly email list number up to? Seven hundred. Seven hundred. Seven hundred. I need to get more. I need to get more. Oh, there's no doubt. There's no doubt. You need to get to a thousand and then a fifteen hundred and just keep it going, man. You know? Yeah. No, five thousand is a good number. Five thousand is a real good number. I couldn't imagine. I can't imagine. It'll be good when I get there. Yeah. And two, you know, are you getting cell phone numbers? I am. So when I enter the contact into constant contact, I put first name, last name, and then after the last name, I put their cell phone number. So if I'm running out of things to do or I can just run down that constant contact list and call those people just check in, say, hey, how's it going? You need anything? So yeah, I am I am getting cell phone numbers. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think we should all be, you know, for everybody listening and, you know, Joe and everybody else, we need to be getting cell phone numbers and email addresses both. We need to make sure when we're cold calling and we, you know, we get that email address. We're having a good conversation. So, hey, is this your cell number we're talking on? Make sure we have their cell number so that, you know, we can also text. Text is going to be the new email. So we're talking about this before we came live. I'm going to release hopefully next week a mass texting platform for all the zero to diamond members to use. It'd be really cheap and really good. I've been using it for those of you who've been receiving text from me. So you're actually getting your weekly out on that. Yeah. I'm sending out my weekly email via text now as well. Put me on that. Put me on that thing. I want to see how that looks. What's that? Put me on that list. I want to see how that looks. I've gotten a couple of text messages from you. Well, I'm using it. I'm using it for the coaching agents. Yeah, yeah. You know, inspirational and sending links to YouTube videos and stuff. But then for my real estate clients, I've just been sending the weekly email via the link that constant contact gives you for the email. I'll link that in the text. And then and then I did like a happy things, given taxed to the to the to my real estate clients and my coaching students.  And then it goes out to as many people is on your list right then. Yeah, what's even better is when they text you back on that on that platform, you have like an inbox, like an email, an email inbox in the system and you can you can go back and forth and they're getting it on their phone like it's a text, but you're going through all your text message replies like it's email and you just respond responding and that's coming back and forth to them on their phone. It's incredible. That's a nice leverage. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to that. I plan on doing a live about it next Friday. I'm hoping I'll announce it later this week if that's going to go through or not. But it's big, man. We're on the front end of all that. So make sure you're getting cell phone numbers, too. I guess I know you've done this before. Is your bio letter that you send out to everybody? Is that already linked in the Facebook group? Not well, not well. I can try to revise the addition. What's that? Maybe upload a revised edition of it. I can send you a copy of it and then you can or I can figure it out. I just I know I tried to upload it probably eight months ago and it was a bad file. Yeah, just email it to me. I'll I'll upload it to the group. So because I got a lot of people asking about it here in the comments. So so like over the last 60 days, Ben, your door knocking or first off, first off, let's just refresh everybody. Maybe go through your door knocking script really quickly just to kind of refresh everybody. There's a lot of has it. Have you tweeted at all since since our last show? No, not at all. OK, so I just knock and say. And there's a lot of body language to this as well. I'm not going to role play. I'm just going to kind of guide through the conversation. So I knock, knock, knock, and then I step back. It's key. You got to be back. I'm literally like this.  I'm not doing anything. And then when they answer, I do this. I step back and I go, hey, how's it going today? Good, good. Well, my name is Ben. I'm a local real estate agent. Don't worry. I'm not trying to get you to sell your house. I promise. Hey, I don't want to take up too much your time today. The reason for my knock is I've got a market snapshot here for you. Everything that's sold in your neighborhood this past year, a bio letter on myself and some customer reviews. That's for you. I close the gap and then I just say and I'm just seeing if there's anything I could do for you now or in the future. No, Ben, we're good. We appreciate it. And then they posture towards the door there. I say, I got you. Well, let me ask you this and I'll scram. I'm getting out of here. I'm not going to bother you anymore. I don't say that. I go, let me ask you this, then I'll scram. If you were to make a move, you have an agent that you would use. It's really important to look at them dead in the eye when you say that because they're they're evaluating you. They're they're scoping you seeing if you're the real deal. And they say if they say no, I say I'd love to be able to help you in the future. Would it be all right if I stayed in touch with you? Sure, Ben, that'd be great. Cool. What's your first name? I always ask for the first name because the first name is easy to give. They're going to give their first name. That's non-threatening. They're not afraid to give the first name. Cool, Ricky, what's a good email address for you? And when I when I say that, I don't even look up from the paper. What's your first name? Cool, Ricky or Ricky. Cool, Ricky, what's a good email address for you? And then I just say, hey, you have my business card. If you need anything in the future, let me know. I've been invited in. I've spent I've had drinks with people. I've sat on people's doors for 20 minutes and then they turn into a sale and a relationship more importantly. Yeah. And that's it. And you can blow through neighborhoods quickly. That's great, man. That's really good.  This is good for just general conversation with prospects. Just, you know, this is good for like the body language, the low pressureness, the the how he asked for the first name. That's almost kind of a, you know, like what I use with letting them commit to staying in touch before I ask for the email address. Yep. You know, it's it's it's leading up to and it's getting them in a positive, you know, it's leading the conversation in a positive way, you know, to get the contact information we need to build our brand. Like the whole thing is, is we're trying to get contact information of property owners that own the type of property we want to sell in order to build brand with them through consistent content. I mean, that's really the name of the game. And through our low pressureness, they end up loving us so much. They just can't wait to buy a one point two million dollar house from us. That is a great. Those are great clients. I love those clients. We actually we looked at every million dollar house, every eight hundred thousand dollar house in the almost the county. And then one day I just looked at them and they looked at me. I go, I think we got to get you some vacant land. You guys got to build and they said, yeah, I think you're right. And then we went under contract after showing them all these huge houses. We went under contract on a on a hundred thousand dollar piece of property, which I was happy for them. I kind of bummed that they didn't buy the monster house. They went under contract on a property. It didn't perk test. It was unbuildable. And then they turned into we went back and circled back on a big one. Right. I took care of them the whole time. I scheduled back hose. I was out there in a grape field. You know, I was out there.  Yeah, we got a lot of grapes in Southwest Michigan. OK, then you're doing in a great field. Just I was I was directing the back hole. I was like, you got to dig here. You got to perk test right here. This is where they're going to build. Holy smokes. That's commitment, baby. Back hole guy trying to figure out where they're going to do the put the septic tank. Yeah. And we were snipping grape vines and yeah, it was it was crazy. It was good, though. It was good. Nice. Legendary service. Yeah. So over the last 60 days, how many doors did you knock 60 days? Probably around four hundred, not a ton, not a ton, four hundred doors. Dude, I can't even imagine.  It goes quick and it's not every day for me right now. I mean, I had I have Jackson helping Jessica with the new baby to do. Two is a game changer. Joe, you got kids. Two man. Yeah. How old are they? Four and six. All right, good. Does it get easier when they get a little older? Yeah. Once they're through the diapers, man, it gets a lot easier. But then you've got a hold of yours. Three and eight months.  But yeah, they get them where they can eat themselves. And yeah, Ricky's screwed, man. Ricky's got a while. He's got a while. I forget where I was at with that, though.  I mean, on the talk with kids, man, I don't know how I'm screwed. I got a sleeper on my hands. He's going to be the only child. You know what I mean? If you've got a sleeper, you're lucky, man. You're doing all right then. Oh, yeah, you're doing great. But what were we talking about right before talking about your door knocking and 400 really isn't a lot of doors. I mean, oh, yeah, the thing is, is like I've never door knocked. So I can't I can't compute. I can't imagine how long it takes to go door to door. That's not a lot, to be honest with you. So you do. Lately, I've just been doing 20 doors at a time and just to get get out there. But I've been I've been busy doing business and busy with the kids and busy with Thanksgiving and all that. But 400 is not a lot. It should be more than that, to be honest with you. Yeah, that's what you guys put your phone numbers in. If you if you have a question for either three of us. So I got a question here. How many doors door slams have you gotten? How many people stand their door in your face? One and out of 4000. Well, two, but technically she she didn't answer the door. She was in a recliner. She was probably like 85. I knocked on the door. She didn't even look.  And I was like, OK, so and then and then I only got one. I only got one slammed in my face. That's it. So you knocked on a door and you heard on the inside of the house. Go away. Yeah, I saw her. She was miserable. OK, I don't sweat that. That's not really a door slam. Yeah, no, I only got one door slam in all those. How does she know that you you aren't? I mean, how did she know who? I mean, like go away, even though you might be trying to give her some give her that big check that she won from the. Yeah, you could have been publishing Clearinghouse. Yeah, she she missed out, man. She missed out. It basically was publishing Clearinghouse. I mean, anybody that will go sit in a great field to help somebody figure out where the septic tank is going to go. You know what I'm saying? That's your guy. Yeah, she missed out on a pretty. I'll I'll work for my clients, man. I've I moved a refrigerator last week. Moved up like a hundred and twenty pound TV from the seventies three weeks ago just to just to get this stuff closed, you know, you got to you know all about moving furniture. Dude, I've moved so many people. I've helped so many people move furniture. Yeah, no, it's not fun. So what was that question? How many door slams? Don't be afraid of door slams, man. Don't be afraid of them. And they're going to happen. Yeah, not really one in four thousand. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. The vast majority of people are receptive and friendly. Yeah, I will say, having done both calls and doorknocks in person people, I think they just feel like they got to be a little more personable, you know? Yes, they do. Yes, they do. We got Dan coming on here. Danny, Dan, how are you doing? I'm good. How are you? Good, man, you're live with us, man. Joe and Ben, can you guys hear Dan? Faint, I'm turning up the volume a bit here. Yeah, his kind of quiet a little bit. I'll put the phone up to the mic. So what's your question, Dan? My question is when you're door knocking, are you looking for people actively trying to sell their homes or looking to provide them with smart information and just create that one-on-one relationship at first? Well, obviously, I'm looking for people that are looking to do something just like Quintavius is going out looking for people that are willing to go right now. But no, I'm just circle prospecting with my with my legs. That's it. And and literally, I've gotten so many calls and so many emails about what are you putting your bio letter or what are you giving at the door? It doesn't matter. Truly, it doesn't matter what you give at the door. You could give one business card at the door. Introduce yourself, smile, have a friendly interaction. That's that's good enough in it of itself. It's it's the human connection that people are looking for. But I do give the comp list and it's information that they can get on Zillow. You know, it's it's available to them. It's just an excuse for me to say hello, just like calling on the phone, a house down the house next to you sold. They know a house next to them sold, generally speaking. It's just an excuse to call and say hi and build a relationship. Grab an email address, stay in touch with them and build a brand. Sorry, you're knocking and I was talking to them. You do write their address down and everything. And I started sending letters to everybody once a month. I'll start sending a letter like right now I'm making up my holiday one just to name in front of them.  If there's a lot of activity in that market, there's one neighborhood that just turns a lot in my neck of the woods six months and then once I knock an area, I'll go back in a year, generally, one year and they remember you for sure. Right. OK, well, I appreciate the advice. Thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure.  Thank you. Thank you, Ricky. Yeah, man. Have a good one. It's just like calling.  I would call ever again, dude. I've never really went back and I'd be honest, dude. I like I've never I've never went back and called another one again, except for so long, I don't remember if I called it ever. You know, like I called Phoenix five, you know, during live calls one time and I ran into a couple of people that were getting my emails and I was like, OK, I've called this one before, but it's probably like seven years ago. You know what I mean? Yeah.   I like came up in the business with no dialer. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? And so now when you can do 10 times as much damage in the same amount of time in today's world, now I'm almost like if I were to to be a new agent in today's market, I think I would circle back to the same neighborhoods every six months and call them again because see back then I was wasting like back then I could only make I did I did. I was like crushing it to get 100 dials in. Yeah. Like it was hard to dial with your finger 100 dials because the bad numbers I still had to dial those with my with my finger to see if they were bad numbers. Like I had to dial 100 numbers. It literally took eight hours. And like that was really tough to like get through 100 numbers. Now you can go through 100 numbers in an hour and a half. And so like it makes sense to go back to those because I mean, it makes sense to go back to the same neighborhoods maybe six months to a year later and revisit it in today's world where you have the ability to make 10 times more calls. But back then it made zero sense because I was wasting another eight hours on a on a subdivision already called and there were so much so many more owners I could call. Yeah. So it's just two different worlds now, you know. Yeah, no, that's fair. That makes sense. And and I'm almost positive. And I know you built your business on the phone. But if you were in an area and Jess and I have talked about this just because my wife, if you dropped yourself in St. Joe, I'm sure you'd call you'd you'd blow people up on the phone. But I think you would see the value more in the door knocking and like the tight knit community here. It's it's not like a super small town, but it's it's small town America, you know. So I don't really really quickly. Ben, what's your what's your Instagram and how can people get in touch with you and send you referrals or reach out with questions or whatever? Do you even know your Instagram? That's embarrassing. I'm looking at that's that's embarrassing. I apologize. Ben, come on, man. It's Benjamin. He has to like pull his phone out. I don't post a ton on there. I only have one hundred and ninety five followers, but only Benjamin J. Stephen, that's it. Benjamin J. He's doing in that picture. What I like that's on Huntington Beach, I believe I climbed that rope. OK, I was hanging on the top. I climbed it without using my feet, though, or yeah, you just use my arms. And by the way, I'm getting back in the gym, Ricky. Nice. Yeah, it was needed. It was needed. The gym is like my.    Yeah, I remember when you came down here, bro, you. You're lifting pretty heavy. We we had a good session there. You know what I'm regretful to that? I told you that I was going to do, but I haven't found the time because I've been busy and I had to travel kite surfing. I missed my lessons this year. Oh, you didn't. You didn't take lessons. No, I missed my opportunity. I'm on hit the kite surfer that I'm going to take lessons with. Actually does a weekly email, though. So he's staying in contact with me. He's building that brand. He is. He is. He's good. He's doing good stuff. We need to get him on the text train. Um, I got a couple of questions here. Yeah, then, you know, I can get your two cents as well, Joe. But one was in Chad, Chad, I see your question. I think it'd be good for that. That looks like a good one to call in, Chad, if if you have time or want to, if not, let me know. But I got one. Can you tell a difference between the connection you have with people you met in person versus over the phone is the quality of the relationship better?  Oh, man, it's like it's a mixture. I've done far more door knocking than I have done calls. I've converted off of calls. But every every one of the clients that are popping into my head right now are a door knock. And they're they're my friends. They're my family now, you know, it's so I lean towards the doors. But either way, it works once if you get an appointment or you make a connection and somebody stayed, you stay in touch with somebody with that weekly and then they call you for a listing appointment. It's the same thing that you start building that connect personal connection right at their table. You know, but for me personally right now as where I stand in the business is my door knocking relationships, no doubt. Are just are just like bar to none. I can call them up and they'll do anything for me because I'll do anything for them, you know. But it's I think it's just skewed because I've done more door knocking than I have calls. I think it'd be this winter. It's going to be relationships off of calls. It's it's it's neither here nor there. I think he might be overthinking it a little bit. Yeah, no doubt. Absolutely. I mean, it's per person. It's per agent. It's it's what's best fits you. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's what Joe said. You just got to stay busy doing something.  Supermarket. I mean, there's there's something to be said there with that personal connection. But I mean, he's got it, man. He's got the smile. He's got the tonality. He's got he's got it. He just he exudes confidence. Yes.  So let's see. Let's see. I had another really good question I saw here. Oh, do you leave anything if they don't answer the door? Yeah, there's the there's these doors from like 1970s that I don't like where the doorknobs are like offset off this off the frame. And I can't leave anything there. But generally, if the doorknobs close enough, I just roll my packets kind of like this. I just stand there. I just roll it up, literally just roll it up with my business card. Tap it, throw it in the door. The wind might blow it away. I really don't. It's it's fine. They'll probably get it. If there's a storm door, I just leave it in the storm door. And then there's those doors that the door handles that look like the you type, I just go up and stuff them in there. And I get calls. I get calls to do CMAs. I get I get calls on that.  Right. So it's not rocket science. No, not at all. Not at all. It's kind of like a voicemail. You always. Chad, how are you, bud? Good. Good. You're live with me, Ben and Joe. Oh, man. I'm watching it right now. Obviously, we're not in the same spot. How have you been? Have a big congrats on the baby, by the way. Thanks, man. Yeah, we're doing good. Exciting. It is. It is. It's been a lot of fun. Oh, cool, man. Cool. Yeah, so I know a little bit about my story. So move up to a new market from Austin about 20 months ago. Had a pretty good year this year. I'm going to close right around, I guess, eight million. So, you know, pretty good for not even being from here or whatever new market. But now I'm basically. Now I'm basically getting asked to move markets again. Which I'm excited about. It'll be better. It's just going to be a better overall place, like for me and my family. Markets better, price points are better. I don't know. Just kind of wanted to get some thoughts. I think who is it? Joe that went through moving markets. How long goes well? Yeah, this is week 19 for me here. Yeah, cool, cool. Yeah, I remember watching one of the shows where you were talking about that. So kind of my plan and just to see maybe if you guys have any other ideas or something that I could do. My plan is basically just to start a circle prospecting in this new new town that I'm moving to. That and obviously I'm going to, you know, I get some stuff from from our website because I'm kind of a bigger brand name or whatever. So I'll get some a little bit of stuff from our website leads. And then only now I just I pretty much when I moved up here, I ran a home value estimate basically they gave me a ton of homeowners names, numbers, emails and their addresses. And then I just kind of use that as kind of my farm. Anyway, that's kind of my plan going. And also I'm going to once I actually get established there, I definitely want to jump on that. The four point train. So I don't know if you see any other thoughts you guys may have was that was kind of my question. Like, you know, what would you do? What did you do, Joe? Well, for me, and it's a little bit different because you're selling right now, correct? In your current market? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So I was in the army and I got done at five o'clock, six o'clock every day and I had weekends off. So it's a little bit different, right? So I was able to invest all of my free time in social media. And the reason I picked social media wasn't because I thought it was any better or worse than anything else. It was because I can't make a cold call. What am I gonna, I can't sell you anything. I wasn't even licensed at that point. So I said, okay, forget it. I'm going to go all in on social media. And I think I quit counting, but when I had been counting, I got up to 7,000 friend requests I sent out and I got back. It was almost half of them accepted in my market. And they all said in their page, on their main page that they live in Port St. Lucie. So I knew they were in my market. And I started with business owners. I started with the mayor, the city council, doctors, business owners, whatever. I'd yelp the best electricians, the best plumbers, the best whoever. And I'd send them all requests and roughly half of them would say yes. And then I'd try to transfer them over to my business page. And I just built a network, man. And then when I got here, I started doing coffees and lunches with all of the biggest influencers, the people I saw on Facebook, the people I saw on Instagram, the people that I saw doing business and other people in the post were recommending them. So I started doing coffee and lunch with them and meeting with them. And then I started building my networking group. And now I've got people calling me out of the blue asking me to go to lunch. And I was just talking to a guy today and he's like, calling you been here, man. I said 19 weeks. He's like 19 months. I'm like, no, 19 weeks. He's like, that's crazy. It feels like you've been here for years, but I'm getting that from a lot of people and it's because of that presence. So it's worked for me, but to reproduce that working as a full-time real estate agent. I'm not, you can do anything, man. Anything you put your time and effort into you're gonna be successful with. But it took me two, three hours a day of messing around with that aggressively. And it's not just numbers, man. It's not just putting stuff out there. That's to start the conversation really it's all the DMs in the background that are paragraphs long. That is where I really connected with people. And those people fell in love with me and connected me with other great people. And now I feel like I'm one of the best connected people in the area and I've been here for 19 weeks. That's great. You know what I think is interesting about the dynamic here with Joe and his social media that I think a lot of people should pay attention to. I think that, I think it's very interesting and this is, you know, I feel about me saying this, Joe, but like you don't have a ton of views. No. You don't have a ton of likes. You don't have a ton, like it's like, if you look at your Instagram, it's not like thousands of views, okay? What I'm getting at is that when you look at social media and you look at the type of business you're running, if you're running, you know, like a personal brand, like if you're running like a business, like I'm running the coaching business, for example, okay? That's a global business, okay? So you can attract people from all over the world, okay? And then, you know, I have thousands of engagements, right? But when you look at it from a real estate agent's perspective or a local business owner's perspective, okay, views don't matter. Followers don't matter. Subscribers don't matter, you know? Having thousands of comments doesn't matter because the town is so small. The city, town, wherever you live is so small compared to say the rest of the country. And so like if you're building a brand that's gonna try to attract people from all over the country, you know? I mean, it takes a long time just to get up to where you're getting, you know, what some people will call really good engagement. But if you're just focusing on one town to try to become the digital mayor or, you know, try to become known in that particular region, this is where people are getting it mixed up. They're trying social media and they're only getting like 50 views of video and they're thinking that they're a failure. And then they quit. Yeah, and they quit. And here I'm looking at Joe's account, looking at 50 views of video, 100 views of video and like every single person, like he gets recognized in restaurants by people that are like, are you Joe Rosen?  Like it's not about the followers or the views, like do it and get, you know, 50 views of video and keep doing it and don't care about the views you're getting, just keep pumping out the consistent content and Joe is like a perfect testament to the fact that it doesn't matter that you're not getting thousands of views. People think that thousands of views is the answer and it's just not when you're looking at a social media, a business where you're trying to grow through social media for a local market. You know what I mean? It's honestly, it's just consistency. I told people all that, I told people that all the time, like, and don't try to get out there.  Well, dude, that's only 12 videos. Like what are you, that's what I do in a day. Like you need to do that all the time nonstop. And that is just the fishing. That's not the fish. The fish is someone doing anything, making a comment, sending you a DM, whatever. And don't just like like it, like actually, and don't say something corny back. Like literally engage them by caring about whatever the hell it is you're talking about. You know, like literally care about it and have an honest converse. Like Ricky, I'm buddies with you now, man. If you sent me something, I'm not gonna say, cool. Like I'm gonna say, that's really awesome, man. I'm excited for, you know, something genuine. That's how you need to be with everybody. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So Chad, like, when are you making this move? It's gonna happen soon. More than likely, I mean, first of the year. Okay. And why are you moving? So just got another opportunity to help start another real estate office in another town. Oh, okay. With the same company you're with. Yep. Oh, okay. Cool, cool. So it's kind of a, it's like you're agreeing to like a voluntary, like they're not forcing you to. You're like taking the challenge on. Yep, exactly. And that's what I did when I moved up here. And I honestly thought I would be here a lot longer.  So, you know, why waste time, right? And then this opportunity came up to say, well, we want to open an office, you know, in this area and we think you're the right guy to do it. Are you going to be the broker? No, I'm not going to be the broker. I actually, I don't have any desire to be a broker at this point. So what role, so what role are you going to have in the company? Like the power, like you're going to be the actual, like top producing agent or? Well, that's still up, you know, to be determined, honestly, more than likely, I'm just, I will start off just being a producer. That kind of helped drive the vision of this new office and getting agents in, helping coach a little bit agents, you know, in terms of productive things to do, to get their business up and running. And as well as probably managing the office. So I'm not going to be the broker, but yeah. So there's already a broker for the office. Yes, there were already. Gotcha, gotcha. They just want you to go there and try to build the momentum of the company there and create a presence. Yep. Well, then all the more reason to do what Joe's telling you to do with the social media and post consistent content and do the same kind of content he does for that area to grow the presence of that company, you know, along with your personal brand. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I really like that idea. Joe, by the way, Joe, I just followed you on Instagram and I'll hit you up later and maybe we can brainstorm and I'll get some ideas from you about some of the things, you know, the granular stuff that you did. Yeah, man, whatever you need, I respond to everything. And also, Ben, what's your social media game looking like? Not, not huge. I mean, I'm getting 50, like if I get 50 views on Instagram, that's big for me. Like, I don't know. I put stuff up on Facebook. I put not a ton. It needs to be better, to be honest with you. I did run a little. Go ahead. Well, I mean, the thing is, like, you know, like if you put 50 people in a room, it's a lot of people. It's a lot of people. Dude, that's what I think about. I used to look at the metrics on that email and like stress about it.  But six months ago, I mean, like 300 people opened it. I'm like, that's not a lot. That's like 50% or what? I mean, but 50% is good. But I think a 300 person party, that's legit. That's a huge party. That's a party, man. Dude, that is, there's not many. I could not fit 300 people in my house. Right, right. Yeah, that's, that was, that's, let's see, that was, let's see, that was probably 10 times bigger than my wedding. Yeah. So it's all perspective, just like you were saying. Yeah. I could do, go ahead, sorry. Think about it.  And then like everybody says the bar's so high because they're comparing theirself to A-list celebrities and stuff. I did do a little pizza giveaway to a hot joint we have in town. A $50 Silver Beach pizza giveaway. I got like 12 emails off of that. I'm giving it away tomorrow. Boom. And people comment, say, hey, we're not interested in real estate. I go, no worries. It's a giveaway. Let me know if you need anything now or in the future. They'll be interested in two years. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.  Yeah, yeah. So that caught, that actually caught some traction. 12 emails off of 50. That's expensive to get 12 email addresses, but I did that the other day and I do some live videos and... You know what's interesting about that though? Yeah. Like you said you spent how much? 50 bucks. Okay, 50 bucks for 12 emails. But here's what's interesting about that. How many people saw you doing it? Oh, I boosted that for $10 just in the local area. So I don't know, 1,000 people saw it. Right, 1,000 people saw that. See, that's the number that's a lot more interesting to me. Like I want to know about the 12 emails, but then 1,000 people saw that Ben Steven was out in the market giving away pizza. Yeah.  You know what I mean? TV is the next giveaway. TV? I give a TV away, just through Facebook. Email address. Email address, share my business page. I'm all over it, dude. That's it. I'm putting notifications on for your account right now. Good, I'll put it on, put it on. I need a new TV. 70 inch. It ain't gonna be a 70 inch here. Oh man. Well Chad, anything else we can help you with brother? Yeah, I got you at some point just because this is gonna be an exciting adventure. It is man. I'm excited for you to start this journey in the new market. Just stay, just get over there. Stay busy engaging with people digitally, voice to voice, build your brand. Just stay busy man, you know what to do. Yeah, I know what to do. I have a question for you. How'd you get to 8 million in the last year? So that was probably, I mean, I would say 50, 60% was probably from circle prospecting. There's your answer.  Yeah, yeah, another 50% or not 50, another probably 25% came from that home valuation, home valuation thing that I run constantly. It's just an ad on Facebook. And then the other maybe 20% came from just organic leads to our website. Rinse and repeat, man. You already know how to do it. Right, yeah, but I need to up my social media game as well as video. I mean, that's, you know. Fair. Chad's a long time follower. He's been following the program for a while. He knows what's up. We'll stay at it, brother. I want to hear about your, I want to hear about the progression of your career in the new market. What market is it? It's a, so if you are familiar, you're probably not familiar with Central Texas, but about an hour, hour and a half south of Austin, there's a German town called New Braunfels. Okay. Awesome place. It's maybe 20 minutes north of San Antonio. Nice. I've lived there before. I lived there for three years when I first got out of college. And I absolutely love it there. So I'm excited to make the move. It's just, you know, as you can imagine moving markets is somewhat of a daunting challenge, but it's a challenge on the left. So I'll be up for it. Dude, I love challenges. All right. So I salute you. Thanks, bud. All right. See you, man. Super nice guy. He's been crushing it. He went from like closing hardly anything last, same as you been. It's actually about the same volume. I think he closed like 400,000 last year. Now he's at 8 million or whatever. Darn near the same. That's great. You guys, if you have any more questions for us, we're going to stay on here for a little while longer and just chat it up for a second. Joe, get a little something going. Yeah, I want to tell you a story. I sent it to you, Ricky, but I don't know if you played it. I sent it to you in the video. I think you thought it was a picture, but I had a guy, this isn't funny. I had a guy reach out to me today on Instagram and we've been going back and forth. He's a Ricky follower. And a couple of days ago, he said, Joe, I'm excited. I got a listing. It's a gal, but her husband died and he's on the deed. What do I do? So I kind of walked him through what to do and everything. He got the listing and he just sent me a voice message today, like two hours ago. And he said, dude, we had the photographer set up for today. We got there today and she was dead. Oh, I knew you're going to say that. And I was like, oh my God. Ricky, did you listen to that thing I sent you on Instagram? Yeah, listened to it right before we went live and I didn't know if it was a joke or it sounded pretty real. It is, I know that guy. At the same time, I just, that's one of those things that once you hear it, you can't unhear it. And I wanted to try to pretend like it didn't happen. But here we are. So. Oh man.  I don't even know how to respond to this right now. That was their first listing? It was his first listing. Okay, hold on a second, dude. Now I got to play it because, because nobody knows who it is, but like the sound of his voice. He's 21. Listen, the sound of this guy's voice, he was like serious, like, I don't know where to go from here. Yeah. Hold on. Let me see if this will play. I might be able to get it up here too, if you can. That's just the real estate gods testing his resolve. Yeah. All right, you want me to play it? Yeah, for the new listing I just got, we had a photography shoot today and we showed up and we found her dead in her front office. So we don't really, you know, know what's next. Hold on. Oh my God. That's it. So yeah, for the new listing I just got, we had a photography shoot today and we showed up and we found her dead in her front office. So we don't really, you know, know what's next. Yeah. He said that with a straight face. Yeah. Yeah, he said that with a straight face and he was like, yeah, that new listing we got. Yeah, we showed up and he was like, he was like, it sounded like he was literally asking his coach, like this is a normal thing, like what steps do you take? Yeah, what? Yeah. Your client is dead. Help me, Ricky. I said call Ricky. Yeah, he was like, he was like, you know, he was like, I just don't know which way to go next. He'll get another one. That's God rest their souls. That stinks. But that's the universe testing him. He's just got to get out and circle prospect more. He'll get one. Every deal has its hurdles. You just keep rolling, man. Yeah, I would say that's a dead deal, though. Oh my gosh. That was a good one. Yeah. Nah, he'll probably pick it up from the heirs. Yeah, I walked him through what to do and who to call and hopefully he still maintains it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's why. Well, guys, you know, I mean, as morbid as that is, y'all want to end on something more, a little more uplifting. Sorry. Tell us about the hospital when you first saw her. Your baby. Yeah, you, that's a good way to end your baby. Well, that's another weird story, I guess, because when she was born, well, when she was born, she didn't make a sound. Yeah. She didn't cry at all.  And then they took her to clean her up on the little, you know, on the little table in the same room, but she didn't make a sound the whole time. Scary. After a good, like, 10, 20 seconds, me and Carla were looking at each other like, and I was like, hey, guys, everything all right over there? You know what I mean?  Yeah. And I looked over there, and I could see between some of the nurses that, you know, she was moving, she was a little like her chest was, you know, breathing and everything else. I saw that everything was fine. They're like, oh yeah, everything's cool. So, you know, that, and then, of course, they took her, you know, to the nursery and everything. So, but yeah, man, dude, she is like the perfect baby. You know what I mean? Like you've seen pictures of her, right? Yeah.  It's like, no, let me send you a picture.  I give, I give Carla credit for that. They say she looks like me, man. And I'm like, poor child because, you know, hopefully she grows out of that. But nah, man, it's been incredible. It's been really, really, really just something else. Everything you said it would be, you know, just like. It only gets better. Yeah. I have a question for you. What's your buyer seller split in sales-wise? I mean, your volume right now, how much is on the sell side? How much is on the buy side? I like this, man. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do a lightning round. You guys asked me questions. This year it's been about 80, 20, 80% listings. Geez. But last year it was 50, 50. It was split right down the middle. I'm split right down the middle on the listing side, 3.9 mil and buy side 3.4 mil. Yeah. And some change. But I was surprised when I pulled that today. I was like, huh, I'm split.  And I think last year it kind of turned a little with the market. See, it goes to, it testifies against the fact that I'm not going after buyers or sellers. Yeah, right. I don't help anybody do whatever they want. And so when you're in that mindset, the market kind of dictates what that split's gonna be based on is it a buyer's market? Is it a seller's market? Is it a, you know, is it a balanced market? Last year it was a pretty balanced market.  You know. How much do you have pending right now? Roughly. Let's see. I probably have maybe eight million. Eight million, dang, that's not yet. And then I just got curious, how much do you have closed? Rough volume this year. Next week, I've got a couple of closings and that'll put me over the million in commissions this year for the third straight year. Good for you. That's about 40 million. Good for you, man. Yeah. Crushing it, as always. Hey, I got a quick question. And for me personally, I don't really care, but I know a lot of listeners, this was a huge thing in one of the groups I'm in on Facebook and they said, you know, I just closed on a property as a buyer's agent and I noticed that the listing agent is getting more than I'm getting. I don't think that's fair. What do you think about that? Can I put in my two cents before I hear Ricky, the coach is two cents? I don't care. I don't care personally. I had an agent call me three months ago and was trashing this guy. He's like, this is how they do business over there. I got, they got four, I got three. I was like, dude, there's no shortage, man. I didn't say that to him, I was thinking this, but I don't, it doesn't bother me personally. Ricky, you might be different. What do you think? It bothers me just a little bit, not enough to worry about it. What I like to do is go into the deal. When I see that, if I see it up front and say, hey, I'm gonna, you mind doing this 50-50? Because look, I got the buyer. Hey, you know, you wanna do a deal today? Because I split everything 50-50, you know? I get it. In my local market, my specific market, Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Foley, Perdido Key, it's all 50-50. There's no agents that are really doing the 60-40 or something else. But if you go up to Fairhope, which is about 30 minutes north, or if you go any further east into Florida, you know, they're taking more on the listing side. So I do deals out on those markets. It doesn't bother me too bad. I don't understand. Like, I don't understand the mentality there. I think it's greedy. I think it's wrong. I think, you know, that the seller is not any more important than the buyer, you know? And, you know, I mean, I just, I don't understand the mentality there of not splitting out 50-50, because I think that we're here to work together, you know, do things like that. It puts a little thorn in the side of people that work with you. And why would you, why in the world would you ever want that, you know? I'll never, I'll never do it. I'll always do the split 50-50. But I know that if that buyer goes into that listing and I only get 3% of that, 2.5% of that, they're gonna be my client when they list it. So it's, I'm just thinking longer term. Well, now when you think about it from the relationship standpoint, I'll do the deal for free. Yes, yes. I will do the deal for free. I'll, I may even, I may, I may even give them, so I may even pay them to do the, you know, like, like it's worth money to me to do the deal and for the relationship for all the future business and repeat business referrals, referrals over referrals.  So I actually have one under contract right now that I'm only getting 3% on. Would you, would you call them? Only 3%, hold on a second, dude. What, only 3%? Well, it's because it's a 7%er, I think. So the listing agent's getting more. Right. So the listing agent's getting, would you call them? And it's already, we're closing on it on the 11th. No, not now. Yeah, yeah. It's over with now.  Sure. And I would ask them via email so that it's documented. Yep. Their answer is documented that way. Later on, if they say, oh, I didn't agree to that, you can just say, well, let me forge you this email. You know? But yeah, I mean, like on the front end, it's all about the relationship over the money all day. Oh yeah. You know? Amen to that. Yeah. No doubt. But you know, I, I'm okay with it. I just don't understand it. Yes. You know? Just can't get it. I don't either. What else? Is that it, Joe? Yeah, that's all. Like I was just so enthralled with what you were saying. I lost my whole, just my thought process went out the window, man. No more questions from you guys? No. When are you going kite surfing next? I wanted to go Sunday, Saturday or Sunday. The wind was blowing, but I couldn't get anybody to come with me. Think Saturday. I can't remember. Maybe it was Sunday, Sunday. Yeah, it was blowing great. It was like 70 degrees, 68 or something. So it would have been great. Probably the last warm day of surfing I could have done before. You know, I don't know if I'm going to get in a wetsuit this year. It's going to take an act of God to get me to get out in that 40 degree weather this year. Yeah. You know? It's 40 degrees cold, do you? In the water. When you're in water going like, you know, 15 miles an hour. Yeah, that's cold. That's cold. Water splashing up on you and stuff.  That'll wake you up.  It's still fun. I wouldn't, you know, we'll see. I may go once this year in a wetsuit. I saw something. Are you not supposed to wear board shorts over your wetsuit? Is that a faux pas? I don't know. Do you? No, I wear, I just wear my wetsuit. OK, fair enough. I was I was on some kitesurf or Instagram and they were commenting that you should never wear your board shorts over your wetsuit. I don't know why you would. Well, they they had a female demonstrate, would I wear my bikini over my wetsuit and it looked ridiculous. So I digress. I digress. It's just, I mean, yeah, I don't I don't know why you. What is that extra layer? Well, what is that doing? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing, man, nothing. It's just shorts over your, you know, like, I don't know. No, I wouldn't do it. Gotcha. Any Christmas plans? Dude, we're just going to be chilling here at the house. You know, we did Thanksgiving here. We didn't want to get the baby out and get her sick, you know? Yeah.  I am going to Long Island, January 29th, to do an event. Who's that with? Joe Sonona. Joe Sonona. I'll look him up. Joe Sonona. And if you guys want to want to take it to that, I think they're $10. It's three hours of CDs, breakfast included for $10. Wow. I'm going to I'm going to talk. They're going to have round table. It's going to be great. So if anybody watching wants wants to do that, just DM me. I'll send you the link event bright link. I'm also going to be in Phoenix, January 16th, to do a to do an event there for a couple hundred agents. So I'm looking for that at Long Island. After I do that event, we're going to drive up to Inman, which will be in I think Manhattan. We're going to go to that event just to just to make an appearance. Nice. I'm looking forward to that. Then, of course, I'll be at the R4. I'm going to I'm on a social media panel for remax at the R4 in Vegas. Let me ask you about R4. Is anybody welcome to that if you're or is it just remax agents? You could you could come as my guest. Oh, really? Yeah.  Sure. There would be certain classes that they wouldn't allow you to go to. Of course, I can't go to all the classes either. You know, yeah, there's some that are just for brokers. There's some that are just for the higher producers. There's some that are just for agents or remax agents there. But I could definitely get you into all the general sessions. You know, I may I may be interested in that. It'll be fun. Yeah.   Like they're I mean, to me, there's a lot of chatter out there. And you know, a lot of debate. But to me, remax is just it, man, because income per agent crush everybody. There's it's like mind boggling the difference in number one and number two. You know, sure. That's I think what it comes down to income per agent. You know, I don't I don't know what other metric. We need to go by when we're trying to pick out pick which company is the best or the, you know, you know, that we just a testament that it's top producers. Sure. They're there. So, Ben, who do you work with? Cressy and Everett real estate. They're out of we cover the Michiana area. So like Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan, it's very, very regional. OK, dude at eight million, you got to be the top agent down there for 10,000 people, aren't you? There's one other agent in my office. That's right around eight million right now. I might get her in the office. I don't know yet. Doesn't doesn't really matter. But no, I'm not. I'm definitely not the the top producer. I think there's there's some people with 20 million right now. There's some heavy hitters out there for this small area. That's impressive. Yeah, when I was in Minnesota, we had 850 agents in that area. It was 120,000 person city and I was number 17 and I was about where you're at. Yeah.  You've got to be a top three, five, whatever guy. I don't think I am, to be honest. There's some groups out there that do a ton. But the the MLS award for diamond in our area is eight million and above. So, I mean, that award for your MLS, Ricky, that's that's low. What's what's your MLS award? Do you even have an MLS award or a board award? We don't have MLS awards. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what that is either. It's just like a recognition. I understand there's a realtor of the year. There's a they have a couple of things they give away, but there's no production oriented awards. Yeah. I mean, production oriented awards through remax, you know, for the state. Yeah, sure. Sure. Yeah, two years in, I'm learning the learning the landscape here. Diamond and remax is a million dollars a year in commissions. Yeah, I know. Yeah. So a little different perspective of what diamond is. Eight million. That's what, 150,000, a little more than that. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me right now. So you think it's a lot of 12 million? I'm hoping, yeah, I'm thinking maybe more, but it's a whole heck of a lot better than 13,000 that I did my first year. Yeah. That was that was tough. That was tough, tough start. So I think somebody's going to come see you guys real quick. Nice. She's a quiet kid. She's not going to cry. Oh, she's hungry. Oh, there she is. What's up, kid? That's content. She's a beautiful baby, Ricky. Congratulations, brother. How are the dogs taking the change? Man, they love them. Good. They love her. Good. They haven't changed at all. They're still doing their own thing, man. They're still wanting to get petted, wanting some food from me. You know, sleeping all day, just living, living the life. Yeah. I saw, I saw a bam, bam, begging for eggs this morning on your story. Or maybe yes. Every day. Having to give him a little bit. That's right. That's right. Good dog. Yeah. Well, cool guys. I guess that's it. Unless you guys have any more questions for me, or Joe has any questions for Ben, or Ben has any questions for Joe, or anybody in the comments have any questions for any of us. Joe, I got one quick question. When are we going to talk about your texting platform and the details of that? Um, next week, probably Friday, I'll release later this week. I'm going to lock it in. And so next Friday, I'll, I'm going to do like a YouTube live webinar kind of deal, go through the whole thing. And that way everybody can, can get on board. Yeah. That'll be next week is kind of what I'm gunning for right now. And it looks like it's, that's going to happen. So definitely this month that I'm also revamping the 90 day action plan, the course scripts and revamping the entire thing. I'm going to incorporate the four point system, the 28 day challenge, the course, everything is going to be, it's going to be just the new and improved like 2.0 ZTD system. That way everybody can kind of get a jumpstart on 2020. I'm going to kind of combine the 90 day action plan with the 2020 goal setting training that I normally do every year. So yeah, man, I'm looking forward to all that. Joe, how do I, I sent you a Facebook request friend request. How else can I follow you on Instagram? Yeah. Instagram. I already started following you on Instagram. Oh, nice. You got a business page on Facebook. Yeah, I do. One second. Yeah. Dude, that's embarrassing. That is embarrassing. Just go send me an info. What is it? So everybody else knows. It's Benjamin J. Stephen. Okay. Southwest Michigan real estate agent. S-T-E-P-H. Yep. At Benjamin.J. Stephen. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Cool, cool. You guys hear about this McGregor fight? Last time I saw McGregor, I was deployed on my, on my drone job. He was fighting Mayweather. He's back in the MMA, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's going to fight cowboy Sharoni. January 16th, I think. That'll be fun. Yeah. They just locked it all in. Nice. He's a cash cow. Yeah. Guy's a cash cow.  I think, I think cowboy will, will mop the floor with that guy though. He gasses out quick. He, he, he doesn't have stamina. McGregor. He punches Lord, but you know, he's stepping up a weight class. I think he's going up to 170. Is he? Oh yeah. That's where he fought Diaz. And that was tough for him. Do you know how old he is, McGregor? Oh. Don't look it up. Take a guess. Uh, how old is he? 30? 31. 31. Oh, sorry. What were you thinking, Joe? I was going to say 32. Yeah. I was surprised 31. I'm just like, dang, he's, I'm 31 in December and I'm not a counter McGregor. What do you think he should be older or younger or what? I thought he was going to be like 34, 35, something like that. But I don't know. I like watching them fight. You 34, 35 is a, is a, is old for MMA. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That is true. Let's see. What's the next live video? I'm going to do these every Tuesday. At 4pm central. So that's kind of our schedule.   So, you know, like we didn't do it the week that, uh, Whitley was born, you know, I'm sure, you know, depending on what day Christmas falls on, you know. So, um, yep. Every Tuesday, at 4pm central will be right here taking your calls, giving you the best content we can, bringing the best guests we can, trying to make a difference in everybody's lives. Nice. When are you, uh, I'm going to start the pot here a little bit. When are you and Tom Ferry going to get together? I saw that story you had with him. Yeah. He, uh, Oh, you don't have to comment. No, no, no, it's fine. He, uh, he didn't respond to me. Yeah.  I love that. I love that you said that.  It's crazy.  Yeah.  You know what I mean? That's not like, that's smart. You know what I mean? So, but for him to ask me why, you know, what would I think if, you know, he came in and, you know, discounted listing prices, you know, it was kind of, it's kind of caveman-ish, wasn't it? Your response was on point, tactful, was not rude. It was just the truth and I liked it. It was. And so, and so like, he didn't respond any of that. He just said, you know, I've been trying to change the industry for two decades now. So we should have that conversation. I would love to see that conversation between you guys. So I said, great, let's set up a call in which he looked at the message and did not respond. Yeah. So that's not surprising. I think he's just full of it. You know, he spent two decades and the industry has went this way with the influence of him as opposed to, you know, trying to get better. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're doing good stuff, Ricky. I would have been out of the business if it wasn't for my broker and you. So us agents in small town America are grateful. You know, we're very grateful. I'm glad to call you a friend. And Joe, I'm glad to call you a friend now too. You too, man. It's been great meeting you. Yeah. Warm up to, I can see why you do so well in door knocking. I only one door slammed in my face, but thank you for the combo. Yeah. It's all about confidence, you know, just like knowing that you're there to help people and standing behind that intention. Your race is all fear. It does. It does. There was the first door is tough, but you just got to get through it and know you're there for the right reason. No doubt. No doubt.  And I'm like, man, look, I'm on a different planet. I'm on a completely different like wavelength than you guys. Like I'm not, I'm, you know, like, and on top of like the, the legacy and the helping the industry and actually moving forward, like, I think I'm actually making more money. Those guys, you know, absolutely. I mean, you're already, you're already creating huge ripples or waves, man. You're saving people from not from leaving the business. And that's what it's all about. That's why I'm doing this. I know that's why that's why I'm here, man. That's why I'm here. We appreciate it. Well, I appreciate your time, man. Thanks for coming on and sharing your, your insights with door knocking and the advancement of your career. You know, what you, what you're looking at moving forward and you know, I just can't wait to see you and Joe both just explode next year, 2020. Thank you, man. I really appreciate you taking the time to have me on and looking forward to the next time. Cool. Guys, again, thank you so much. Hit subscribe. If you haven't already, leave me a five star review on iTunes. And if you haven't joined the free coaching program, that's at zero to diamond.com. And we'll see you guys on the next show. Love you guys.


In this section, I will explain how the implied dividends can be calculated. So, we can use this formula to calculate the value of the implied dividend and that is symbolized by a capital D with a bar at the top of it and in this, you are taking the spot price, you have your expected rate of return and then we have got the forward price and to explain this, I am going to use an example. Suppose our spot price of a certain asset that is $100 and your rate of return that is $0.08 it can be the risk premium also and suppose your future price you know that too and that is $103 so you will plug these values into your formula and then you will get the value of the dividend and you will get to know that for a certain spot price and future price and given risk premium, you will be able to get the implied dividend will be $5 so, in this way, you can easily remove the value of your implied dividend from this formula.


Our next presentation is by Noah Hassan Mustafid talking more generally about advancing Noah's mission with support of AR. As everyone knows, Noah has come early to the game and has a great story to tell. Hello everyone, my name is Hassan Mustafid and my colleague Greg Tosik from the same agency, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. We are pleased here today to share with you how we are advancing AI in support of our organization or our agency mission. This is our outline. In the first slides we're going to talk about the big data, the Noah big data, then the Noah strategies and then we'll focus on AI strategic planning and I'll be sharing with you a few examples of AI implementation with Noah data and then to open a few questions to the audience or some discussion for the audience and then I will end with some enhancement. So talking about the Noah data or Noah big data, it's amazing how much data has been collected. Instruments are at work daily gathering ocean data from current speed to the movement of schools of fish and much more from acoustic, fisheries acoustic or site scans can send our multi-beam instruments as well as audio or video and from different platforms and crewed platforms, satellite. It's about 20 terabytes of data collected daily. Of course this represents a new frontier for understanding or opening the end-down of the oceans but also generating a larger volume of data that can overwhelm traditional data handling and visualization method. There is needs for more efficient processing of these novel data streams and needs for high performing computing communication. In this slide I put a few couple maps there. The first, the top one is the integrated ocean observing system environmental sensor map. This is basically representing all the all the sensors that are active within US and other parts of the world. Now you can see there is some inland ones there and then also because we are partnering with other agencies and they're representing their data in there too, their sensors. The map, certainly this is very interesting to explore such as Google I use environmental sensor map. You should be able to get there and the bottom one is representing the sensor, I mean the assets, observing assets there. There is some lines you can see in the left in the west coast. Those are gliders or encroached vehicles doing those surveys and then they overlap on a global current model. So talking about the big data, we have been talking about big data for a while now and think we are coming to come into an end as the focus shifts from how we collect data to processing data in real time. Big data is now a business asset supporting the next errors of multi-cloud support, machine learning and real-time analytics in other words. We are moving to emerging era of AI or artificial intelligence. That's why we are here today to talk about. So I'm sure agencies around the world are also trying to figure out how to deal with emerging technologies and NOAA is also doing the same thing. And here we are showing six NOAA strategies that were released last year, early last year. The NOAA cloud strategy, the NOAA data strategy and crude system strategy, NOAA citizen science strategy, the omics or DNA genetics strategy and finally the NOAA artificial intelligence strategy. All of it is in the science council website if you are interested to explore them more in detail. Talking about the NOAA AI strategy that is dramatically expanding the application of AI in every NOAA mission area by improving the efficiency, effectiveness and coordination of AI development in users across the agency. As I said it was released early last year and it's available in the science council website. The NOAA AI strategic plan basically this is making that strategy or moving transition that strategy to actions and this is a strategic plan for 2021, 2025. It identifies specific actions with leads and target completion dates and also synergies between or with other strategies that I mentioned to you in the previous slide. This one was released early this year and it's also available in the science council website. You have a link there in the bottom of this slide. So let's move to the goals of this strategy, the strategic planning. The goal one is to establish a NOAA center for AI, enable coordination of AI, research, algorithm development, data acquisition, applications, information exchange and awareness. Other functions would be maintaining the portal and open source of government application, hosting training event and workshops and facilitate new partnership and of course leveraging across strategies, especially the data and the cloud strategies. Second goal is to fuel the research and development component of advancing AI and assess gaps for AI expertise and asset across our agency and then identify solutions to fill the gaps, prioritize AI based approaches and support NOAA research grants and federal funding opportunities and other form of grants. Establish an annual research and development price competition and finally improve algorithms and evaluate model performance. A goal three is basically transition those R&D projects into operations at operational capabilities and you can see in the left side there we use a readiness level to move from O to R and from R to O. Strengthen and expand AI partnership as I mentioned earlier in my first slides is that partnership is a key and collaboration between different partners is a key to advance AI. We are partnering with academia with private sector such as Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon and others. Then the last one is compete and assessment of training needs and create an online AI learning and support center. Basically this is to promote AI proficiency in the workforce through our internally or externally through different program that we have with academia partnering with academia and then advance of course education programs to address AI needs. Then my next slides is more about showing you or sharing with you there are some applications that we have for different type of data that we collect in our agency. This one is to address the need for climate predictions and uses an unsupervised learning to detect different regimes in the model dynamics. It's a neural network that classify regimes through training with surface data from a climate model or satellite observation useful for assessing things like heat transport, important for predicting climate variation. There is more details in the paper on the bottom there. There is a link so in Wally I'll 2019. The next example is the use of a neural network, trained at no linear ensemble mean to improve global wind and wind wave forecasting. EM stands for in the maps stand for standard ensemble mean and NN stands for neural network nonlinear ensemble mean. The red is over estimation and blue is under estimation compared to ultimate observations. You can learn more again from this last year paper by Campo Cial 2020. And the next one is to address the need for the beach gurus for safety reason and that is to detect the rip current through the constant imagery and this is used it's again a partnership between our agency and scientists from academia in this case here University of Santa Cruz and the machine learning that was trained here is a convolutional neural network to detect rip current and those images that's collected in the beach and this is to support rip current forecast model. Again there is a recent paper that was published this year by the Selva YAL for more details. This is an example of a tomated site scan sonar contact detection for safety of navigation surveys. It's an innovative image processing and machine learning technique designed to reduce the number of false alarms. This automated technique are directly applicable to port security preparations so we are able to get the dimensions and probability associated with with each contact as you can see in the in the one in the slides in the bottom or the figure in the bottom left right and left. A major challenge of coral reef monitoring is a huge data processing when we do 300 and 500 sites per year. Given the scale at which we work and the increasing threat to reef fish or sorry reef coral reef reefs we are placing increasing phases on imagery to reduce operational complexity and increase scope scale and scale but this necessitates development of artificial intelligence machine learning tools to extract data from all the new imagery. So this is again a collaboration between our agency and University of California San Diego that developed the coral net tool that is an online software package that automate analysis of bentic photo quadrants. This open access software is widely used by reef scientist and manager. It has the ability to generate fully automated or semi-automated annotations of coral reef. The next one is automated site scan or this is this one is more of sorry this is the image image inflow cytopods and it's an in situ automated submersible flow cytometer that generate images of particles taken from the aquatic environment and capture in situ images of phytoplankton. Again this is a collaboration between Integrated Ocean Observing System, Regional Partners, South Central California Ocean Observing System and Axiom Data Science. They developed the pipeline to improve the accuracy of phytoplankton species classification and submit submit the image flow cytometer data to inform about harmful algal bloom in a publicly accessible web portal. And so it applies the machine learning technique on the streaming data in the cloud environment that can increase the efficiency and the accuracy of data managers in the public for data managers public. Again there is links there if you want to learn more about this project. The next one is application to fisheries data. This is the case for scallop survey done by HAPCAM. This is the sixth generation of HAPCAM deployed on RIMAS 600 AUV and it collects a large amount of data. It's about the habitat or the HAPCAM bentic survey from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole collected about five million image pairs per year. So manual annotation of sea scallop and fish from approximately two percent of the images are used to provide estimate for stock assessment and management. This is the application of artificial intelligence here is a convolutional NORA network CNN that was deployed on a VAMI software toolkit and it annotates the full image data but also detects additional species target and reduce manual annotator load. In other words most of these computers computer vision applications are the objective really most of them is to reduce the time of processing but increase the accuracy and precision of the detection of classification of the targets or the objects. Another example show you is the AU fishing example here this is the dynamic prediction system for illegal and reported and regulated activities in the Pacific and the objective here is to use the machine learning to identify any various vessel behavior across the Pacific as a function of suspicious AIS disabling and authorize the transshipment and overlap with protected or vulnerable shark and tuna species. So the benefit here is to provide low enforcement with data that need to look at and AU fishing activities. Again there is a link down there if you want to learn more about some of these applications. The last one is what you're trying to do with this one is during the surveys that we have in northeast fisheries science center for bottom throw surveys we try to collect imagery and data to build a ground fish image library to develop test and advance the application of machine learning algorithms in support of fishery electronic monitoring program. I think some of my colleagues from NOAA presented or are going to present on these applications for electronic monitoring. Then finally I want to talk a little bit open some challenges that we are facing with advancing AI in our agency and as I showed you those projects or those applications are very small and then the question is they are localized and not like everything is shared resources but they are specifically for specific data set or data type. Now when you talk about transitioning these all applications to operation that's something that of a challenge to to agencies so organizations. So we what I would like to do here is more of giving you a few options that we are thinking about we are this is still work in progress and the question there is what cyber infrastructure is needed to advance AI in our organization or your organization. The option option one would be to to make a centralized resource management of course there is pros and cons on that doing that the pros can have more resources in one network centralized and centralized maintenance and then the cons there is that when everyone want to have a space in there for himself then they it will generate some conflict or conflict may arise on task scheduling and work prioritization and the option is decentralized resource and management again there is pros and cons I will let you read through them and the last one is a hybrid between the two and so this is percentage of resource can be allocated. Again you can read through them and we can have a discussion panel discussion. With that I would like to finish with a few announcements one is the NOAA the first one is the NOAA workshop on leverage in AI in environmental sciences this is the third one it will be hosted at the NOAA center for artificial intelligence in Boulder, Colorado during September 13-17 of this year if you are as you like skiing this is the perfect time to be in Boulder, Colorado. The second one is the GPU hackathons this is a collaboration between NOAA and NVIDIA and this is the REN AI hackathon on NVIDIA cyber infrastructure and this event will be this year August 23, 29, 28 and September 1st basically two weeks first week to set up the teams and then do some applications and testing the data and then algorithms and then the second week is really doing the work this is a hands-on really a very good opportunity for someone who have already a team and they would like to train and test some of their applications into multi GPUs and NVIDIA provide basically there is mentors that help you to set up the system and get into the NVIDIA systems. I did one last year I hosted one team and we had really a good time testing some algorithms and training them on on multi GPUs basically testing them in how they work and how they perform in multi GPUs so I will encourage everyone to to look at this one all part of them thank you very much and if you have any question happy to answer and thank you have a good day bye bye. Thanks very much Hasan thanks for sharing NOAA's message and we note that NOAA has published the AI strategy that looks at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of work through the development and use of AI but NOAA seems to have a very strong commitment the agency seems to have can you give us some feeling of how did this commitment come to be from early 2014 we heard that they were investing in this and seem to have a lot of horses out of the gate and running what was it that brought this to such great attention in NOAA and maybe other agencies can learn from from your experience thank you Kim that's a good question there I think that if you look at how advocacy is well let's say stay within us there is the privates or private sector really it's it's advanced it's so far you know advancing and implementing AI Google Amazon all these private entities are are going so far but the government agencies like NOAA you know to that that produce the data and we know the challenges of the data of the data processing you know we we we kind of started you know thinking how we can move in the same level as these private you know companies and you know match exactly what we do in in terms of data processing but again the thing that moved NOAA to this level of producing these strategies and trying to you know to compete is that we have in a good timing we have a good leadership it's all to do with the leadership so team vice admiral team Gallaudet came into NOAA and said you know what this is what we are going to do we are going to move forward with this you know a new this emerging technologies it's not only AI but you can see we had to we had to look at all you know possibilities I mean citizen science came the last one and we had to edit as well but first time we we've been focusing on encrowed systems like because because we had a lot of already we had to figure out what to deal with that how to deal with them the encrowed system gliders all these platforms and manage systems we don't call it and manage anymore we called encrowed because that was something that we have to change but then AI also came into the mix because he was a meteorologist I mean sorry he was he was meteor but also oceanographer of a navy so oceanographer or navy coming into NOAA and saying you know we have to and he was an acoustic he was dealing with acoustic as well so hydroacoustic like sonars all these things and you know massive data from acoustics that comes into NOAA and how to process those data right now I can tell you I've been in survey for many many years many years in surveys doing acoustic but what we take we take only target species from those acoustic data what is the rest of a whole ecosystem that is in that data we didn't we cannot deal with it we just have like one percent two percent of data processing so so I think answering your question Kim is that a leadership is a key in moving things forward when he sees that there is a team behind him and supporting him so you have that team behind there but if you don't have a leadership you know you know pulling everything forward it's always been hard to do things in any agency so I think what you what you saw Kim it's it was fascinating journey and we have a new administrator now and we have a new new boss now for NOAA and he was he is fantastic Rick Spinrad he will again move things again forward I'm sure that all these emerging technologies are going to flourish as we move forward so Hasan it's it's great to hear about that foresight in leadership that was happening in the US but also your enabling private environment that enabling environment where there was a lot of skill sets and so on and the requirement coming through the data luckily innovation has been put forward as a major push for FAO under the new leadership that we have here under the general I'm going to turn over to Anton because we're talking more about policy questions and so on Anton do you have a question please for for Hasan yeah maybe because I know Hasan has a good background in in geo data so maybe he can bring some lessons from the geo people for managing geospatial data what would you recommend the AI people that maybe a few years behind a few months behind me in terms of data storage data sharing and data standards so maybe some quick reflection yes thank you thank you Anton I think that's a big question of course we are all trying to to wrestle with I mean I mean at the end of my of course my presentation was not presented all because it's maybe was long and we don't have time for that I I understand it but I had a lot of examples in there showing all those AI in action and and I think one of them well we're dealing with with models with with very very sophisticated models and we have to advance them geospatial models and all these things so the current situation with with advancing AI in NOAA is to do with a fact that we need a shared infrastructure we cannot have every office or every program have its own infrastructure or yeah we have to figure that out we have to figure out you know that first you need to organize your data okay you need standard for that we've been developing standard for for different type of data but also in other word we are calling it AI ready data and we have a whole working group on that right now is is is is been you know trying to figure that out and then since we we're we're establishing this center of artificial intelligence it will basically have a centralized in a role to make sure training and everything there and then making this data ready but again it goes to training data where what you are going to do with training data we are going to host it we're going to put it and so we have this the good thing about about NOAA is not taking only about AI I just one colon it's taking about it horizontally you are talking about cloud you're talking about big data in same time as you're talking about AI so when you are putting all this together you now you have the cloud ready you have the big data ready and then you have AI ready so that's how it should work it should have to go horizontally across all this all these you know columns whatever and so talking about answering your question about standards yes there is now enough standard for geospatial data that we can we can adopt or adapt but also it comes to when you're running these algorithms on top of these data you need a power okay now you're talking about power and speed and so the good thing what we've been doing is a partner with nvidia and we're using basically I I ran one in video hackathon last year and we brought a lot of it was how many images from coral reef because we've been trying to figure out coral reef how we can advance the coral reef segmentation and notation and then you know classification and to do that we had really to use the multi gpu system from nvidia and so we had teams coming all together in one place using multi multi gpu and you know using all that you know singularity docker all kind of that thing that nvidia provides you but also we had mentors from nvidia helping us to set all that so what I can say is that you need to partner this partner with with other private like nvidia or google or microsoft or arc gis or companies or or you know all that is going to help enable AI to be implemented in the right way and without that I don't think it's easy and in my presentation I have one slide that can give you a direction how to set up your hackathon within nvidia I mean it's just feasible to do it's not hard but I think if a you might probably think about how they can enable and facilitate you know this work but by making this partnership with nvidia and others and then creating these hackathons or code sprint whatever you can call them but those are going to help enable everybody to come and share and work together I hope that answer your question and on thank you very much Hasan that story about getting an AI ready ecosystem of all the parts is very insightful very helpful for everyone working in smaller teams thank you


In this presentation, we will take a look at the employer taxes calculation. It's important to keep the difference and distinction between the employer taxes and the employee taxes when considering payroll taxes. This can be difficult because they are related in some ways. There's some taxes that'll look much of the same and because the employer really is the one responsible for actually making the employee pay the employee taxes, meaning the employer is really the one that is physically conducting the logistics of writing the check or making the payments for the taxes to the Fed and the state, but they're coming out of the employee paycheck. So the employer is still making the payment or physically making the payment, but it's being paid by the employee in the case of employee taxes as opposed to the employer taxes where they're not coming out of the paycheck. These are the taxes.