Welcome Broker’s Playbook fam! Today we have Sam Hewit on the podcast, Director of Realtor Development at Royal LePage Signature Realty, the largest independently owned franchise. Sam is dedicated to helping real estate agents develop a predictable, repeatable, and growing business with given tools and resources. In this podcast episode, Sam shares her wealth of knowledge on how any real estate agent can reach X number of deals a year! Get started on your prosperous real estate journey today by tuning into this informative video. Don’t forget to like a subscribe!
Bobby Puim: Sam Hewit, welcome to the Broker’s Playbook podcast. How are you today? I’m great.
Sam Hewit: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. I was less excited when I walked in and saw that shirt.
Bobby Puim: Oh, this? This old thing. My Houston Texans shirt. Yeah. That’s so funny, right? Yeah. Houston. Houston being the better team in the like the Texas based teams.
Sam Hewit: Not not really for.
Bobby Puim: For those of our listeners that don’t know Sam’s a Cowboys fan so.
Sam Hewit: The better team of Texas.
Bobby Puim: Oh it just hurts to hear yeah. What did Dak Prescott say in the news the other day? Something like he’s not going to have ten interceptions this year. Did you read this?
Sam Hewit: I did. And I believe him. Yeah. I’m a.
Bobby Puim: I. I also believe him. He’s going to have 21 like it’s not ten.
Sam Hewit: I’m sorry. Who is your quarterback for the Texans.
Bobby Puim: It’s C.J Stroud. He’s a stud. Yeah. Oh, never heard of him.
Sam Hewit: I don’t know I’ve heard of him.
Bobby Puim: Heisman finalist two years in a row.
Sam Hewit: Good segue to our conversation today. Shout out.
Bobby Puim: C.j.. Come on, man.
Sam Hewit: Does our. Does the finalist spot count? Does does. Almost made it count. We should talk about that today.
Bobby Puim: And finishing second is okay, right? No, it’s not. It’s absolutely not. Oh goodness. Okay. Sam, what’s your title with Royal LePage Signature Canada’s largest Royal LePage brokerage, correct?
Sam Hewit: That’s correct. We are the largest independently owned franchise. I am the director of realtor development, which is just a fancy way of saying I am in charge of helping the realtors at Royal LePage Signature develop a predictable, repeatable, growing businesses. So my mandate is that I develop programs, training programs, content ideas, marketing materials. Basically, the goal of my role is that you show up as a realtor and you say, I want to do X number of deals a year. And I say, Okay, here’s how you’re going to get there, and here are the tools and resources we have to provide to you.
Bobby Puim: It’s amazing how many how many realtors at the brokerage we’ve.
Sam Hewit: Got 1500.
Bobby Puim: 1500. You do that for 1500 individual people. That’s incredible. Correct. I only I try my best to do it for 55 here with the REC Canada team. You do a great job. Great job. That’s all. I really wanted to hear you.
Sam Hewit: Do different things for 55.
Bobby Puim: This is this is the Dallas Cowboys versus the Houston Texans.
Sam Hewit: There’s your analogy. This is on record, right? We’re recording this. I think we’re I hope I heard you say that the Dallas Cowboys were the better Texas.
Bobby Puim: They’re just bigger. That’s what it is. It’s bigger. Bigger. Fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. We’ll be okay. So. So you you help them build predictable businesses, you’re able to take point A and get them to point Z.
Sam Hewit: Exactly. So yesterday I had a realtor come in to see me, and, you know, last year she would or I guess two years ago now, she would have done, I think, ten transactions, which, you know, with price points in the GTA is is a healthy business, certainly not where she wants to stay because, again, that predictable, repeatable, growing business is a piece of the puzzle. And, you know, we had a we’ve we’ve had some really good chats over the last 24 months. And last year, she really struggled. She had a really hard time. She was not where she wanted to be. She came in and she said, I don’t I don’t know. So I said, okay, well, we got to get serious about what you’re doing, so let’s sit down, let’s craft a plan. Let’s take all the tools and resources available. She came in yesterday to see me just off the cuff. She was working on a deal last night. You know, the market’s obviously changed a little bit since that second Bank of Canada announcement. And she came in to talk about the offer and then she said, you know, I wanted to tell you a secret, but don’t tell anybody. So I’m not telling anyone except for all the listeners and you and Cristina in the room. But she said, I actually am very excited to tell you that I surpassed If I finish this deal tonight, that’ll be my 20th deal this year.
Bobby Puim: Incredible.
Sam Hewit: And it’s the end of July. For context for your listeners. So I mean that those really are the success stories that I want and those really are the instances where I can very clearly draw a line between what we offer. Now, the secret sauce is she has to do the work execution. Exactly. So I mean, my mandate is that I provide the platform and the tools. But, you know, you’ve got to. Not get the ball intercepted.
Bobby Puim: Oh, just shots fired. Yeah. Oh, goodness.
Sam Hewit: I think it was Bill Belichick a few years ago. Their mandate for the for the Patriots they’re they’re like team slogan for the remember that was do your job. Do your job. So I’ve said that a few times to folks like I give you the tools but you got to go do your job. You got to do the work.
Bobby Puim: So it’s execution, I think. Here is the moral of the story. I love it. One of the things that we’ve taken away from from what you guys do at Signature is your connectivity plan, Right? If I’m not mistaken, it’s eight relatively basic steps here to then expand upon. Yeah, execute. And things just happen to fall in place. Yes. So an action taken equals a result that you’re hoping for. Walk us through some of these eight points, if you don’t mind. Yeah.
Sam Hewit: So it’s actually even simpler than that. So the idea behind the connectivity plan is you take one piece of of content or thing, for lack of a better word, I got to figure out a better word for thing. But you take one thing, one thing, one thing, and you deliver it three different ways to your audience. So as an example, I had someone came in to see me yesterday and he said, you know, I’m really having a tough time right now. So I said, okay, well, what is your connectivity plan look like? What are you doing? And he said, Well, I don’t have anything on the schedule for July and August. What should I do? And I said, I think you should do CMAs, you should do comparative market analysis for all of your clients and everyone connected to you. It doesn’t have to be someone you’ve done a deal with. But you know, my hairdresser, for example, I’ve never done a deal with her. But every time I go to her house, to her basement to get my hair done, she asks me about the market and what’s going on. So I said to him, I think you should do CMAs. So the CMA is the one thing or the item. And so you can take that initiative and you can do the CMA and you can do them on on video, on Bombbomb is my suggestion. So you record your screen, you have the most recent sales, you do a quick one minute video to the client or person you’re connected to. You send it to them and that’s one touchpoint. So you need three. Then you can follow up with a phone call in a week or two and say, Hey, Bobby, just wanted to make sure you got the CMA I sent you.
Sam Hewit: Great. And then if you don’t answer the phone, I can send you a text or I can also send you a CMA on email, or I can put up on my social media. If you’re interested in knowing how the changes in the market have impacted the value of your home, reach out to me for a market analysis. So that would be the third kind of piece of the puzzle. And so when I when I have agents that kind of are struggling, you know, and I talk about the connectivity plan, anyone that works at signature is very tired of hearing me talk about this. They’re very exhausted. Like my friends that are not cowboys friends. They’re very tired of hearing me talk about the connectivity plan. But it really does give you a foundation and a roadmap. And when you and I have chatted, Bobby, about your team and you’ve said to me like, how do you kind of keep people focused? Like, this is a very real estate is a sales based, exciting, dynamic industry, but it’s incredibly reactive and it’s hard to build structure. And so all I tried to do by creating this connectivity plan is give people structure where they don’t get kind of lost in the weeds with their prospecting efforts. They have a plan and they stay committed to it and. Further to that, the idea behind the connectivity plan is that it doesn’t change every year you develop. This is the thing, the initiative every month and it stays like that. So if I look at some of the really successful agents in our company, they do the same thing every year.
Bobby Puim: Standard operating procedures.
Sam Hewit: Standard operating procedures.
Bobby Puim: Year over year over year. Actual business. Correct. Incredible. That’s what I’m trying anyways.
Sam Hewit: It’s not. It’s not foolproof.
Bobby Puim: Well, tell me. Tell me about it not being foolproof. I mean, we actually built this into our CRM for our agents, so we took a huge, I don’t know portion of what you had going on and we gave them ideas. So like every January they get a task reminder that says, Hey, this is happening. Is it mortgage checkup time? What in your business is going to be your one thing done three, four, five ways because a CRM in theory will allow you to do so? Yes, absolutely. And are you pushing it out? So the conversation actually comes all the way down to what are we doing today? What is the next action taken? What is the result we want and how how are we going to connect those dots? Yeah, I love it.
Sam Hewit: And I think it’s so awesome for you and your team and your listeners who are interested in being part of the REC team because you can do things that I just can’t offer, right? Like I can’t. I would love to be able to build it into a CRM and send out a reminder, and I’d love to be able to have that that level so that the people on your team just have to open their CRM and go, What am I doing today? I don’t I don’t have the ability to kind of go that deep with it. But the fact that you do, I think is even more of a value add because people on my team will say to me, Just tell me what to do. And I’m like, Well, I am, but I’m not there every day. Like, I’m giving you the guideline. And so I think it’s awesome you’re able to do that for your people because that’s even more accountability, which we all need.
Bobby Puim: It’s it’s what Simos pays me to do, right? The big guy. So, so for all of the listenership, we actually took portions of what you’ve got going on and then what I was able to build in the background and up on the Broker’s playbook website brokersplaybook.com. We’ve got a Broker’s Playbook branded connectivity plan. Awesome. So anybody looking to take that right and sort of run with it. There’s a there’s we call it a lead magnet, if you will, just making realtors better day over day. So that’s up on the website brokersplaybook.com You’ll find it right on the home page everybody. Sam Sam Now we’re not going to talk real estate for a moment. Oh, okay. Why? Why for real? Are you a Cowboys fan? What is going on? I’m just kidding. I’m kidding. The real the real thing that I want to talk about is Taylor Swift. Today, I saw you in Denver.
Sam Hewit: I was in Denver.
Bobby Puim: You were in Denver. You’re a Swiftie
Sam Hewit: I’m a Swiftie. I’m a Swiftie. You may not you may not know that. I think that look, on the personal side, I think she’s incredibly talented. I think she’s very gifted musically. I think if you listen to her lyrics and the way she can tell a story in a song, I really do think she’s, you know, a legend of our time for sure. I also think there’s so many things that you can take from her from a business capacity.
Bobby Puim: I love this. I knew you.
Sam Hewit: Were going to say this.
Sam Hewit: Okay? I mean, listen, the reason why I love sports and the reason why I love, you know, I love golf, I love football. I think I just love the stories behind the players. And, you know, when you look at Taylor Swift was your question. But we can also talk about the Cowboys and the Texans. But if you look at Taylor Swift and you look at first of all, her show in her eras tour, the show is 3.5 hours. She’s on the.
Bobby Puim: Stage. It’s wild.
Sam Hewit: Yeah. She comes off the stage to, you know, do a quick costume change and they change the set and then she’s back up and she’s wearing, you know, high heeled sparkly boots. I’m in the audience in running shoes and I’m my feet hurt, I’m hot. Like, I’m sweating, you know, and she’s just looking beautiful and doing her thing.
Bobby Puim: So she’s an athlete. You think she’d play quarterback for the Texans?
Sam Hewit: Well, she might need a.
Sam Hewit: Quarterback for the Texans.
Sam Hewit: She might be better than C.J..
Sam Hewit: She’d probably win.
Sam Hewit: She’d probably win the Heisman.
Sam Hewit: Poor guy.
Sam Hewit: I know. Poor guy. Sorry, C.J., But I think when you look at her show, what I think is is so incredible is that it looks easy. And I think if you look at very successful people, including realtors, they make it look easy. A successful agent will complete a transaction for a client, for a buyer or a seller. And the goal at the end is the buyer and seller goes, Wow, that was amazing. There was no problems, no hiccups. If there was, they handled it professionally and it looked really easy to the point that sometimes the client goes, Man, you made all that money to do this like, but they don’t see what actually goes on in the background. Right? And I think it’s the same with Taylor Swift. I watched a 3.5 hour show that was spectacular. But you don’t see the hours and hours of rehearsals and the literal thousands of people involved in the background, the security guards, the stagehands, the lighting people, the music people, the audio, the this, the backup dancers, the. You don’t. All you do is watch the show and go, Wow, she’s so great. That looks so easy. I mean, maybe I could do I mean, I know I couldn’t do it, but I’m sure there were people watching.
Sam Hewit: Thinking I could do wow.
Bobby Puim: Yeah, it’s me. Wow.
Sam Hewit: But I think that for this business, I argue, it’s a little bit of the same thing I tell our team. Like it’s good if the client, if it looks easy to the client, that’s what you want. You want that Staples easy button that I have on my desk, but at the same time. It goes against us because they don’t see all of the effort and time and energy that goes into the the back end of what it is we do. They don’t see the hours and the hours on the connectivity plan and the prepping for the listings and the research and the analyzing of the data and the stats and the learning. And, you know, they just see you show up with this really pretty presentation that I’ve prepped for everybody.
Sam Hewit: And.
Sam Hewit: Ta da, you know, some glittery Louboutins that Taylor strutting across the stage in. But you know, it really is I have so much respect for her as a brand and what she’s been able to accomplish. And you know, one of the things we talk about at signature is this idea of building advocacy in your database, right? That’s the idea behind the connectivity plan to build advocates. And when you go to a Taylor Swift concert, that lady has advocates like there are. I’m not a I’m not a die hard.
Bobby Puim: So, so much so that our prime minister is begging her to put Canadian dates on this tour.
Sam Hewit: That’s wild, wild.
Bobby Puim: Wild world leaders.
Sam Hewit: World leaders.
Bobby Puim: So I don’t think that every realtor in the business is aspiring for world leaders to be their advocates here.
Sam Hewit: But yeah.
Bobby Puim: I love it. Sam, thanks so much for joining us today. All right.
Sam Hewit: Thanks for having me.
Bobby Puim: You’re the absolute best. I take so many things away from.
Bobby Puim: Every conversation that we have. And like my I love that you’re a Taylor Swift fan. I’m also a Taylor Swift fan. Yes. So if Taylor if Taylor is listening. No, I’m just kidding.
Sam Hewit: Are you are you going to tell us your Taylor Swift story?
Sam Hewit: Oh, my goodness.
Bobby Puim: The audience for the audience. Yeah.
Sam Hewit: So you were going to.
Bobby Puim: So my background here. So flip the script. Sam always does this to me. Puts me on the spot. I love it. I used to I come from chiropractic. I went to chiropractic college in Texas. I used to to work in a clinic. And one of the things that I did as sort of like I would call it a loss leader, if you will, was I worked with for free two hours a week with student athletes at one of the local high schools.
Sam Hewit: I love that.
Bobby Puim: The football team in Texas and the baseball team at this Texas high school, they had their own chiropractor. Every other team didn’t. So I’d work with the golf team, I’d work with the girls volleyball team. It was wonderful. And they would come in and I would always just change the. Do you remember Pandora music? Do you ever hear this? Pandora radio was wonderful. You could take What did I do? The Temptations, Taylor Swift, another band that I liked, and one country band, the Randy Rogers Band. And I would throw a mix together, right? And Pandora had the eye to just pump it out. So this.
Sam Hewit: Was before Spotify.
Bobby Puim: Way before Spotify.
Sam Hewit: I’m old.
Bobby Puim: I’m old. Okay, so I throw this on and Taylor Swift would come on a lot. And then a friend of mine bought me this shirt. It just says, T-swift on it. It’s my favorite shirt. T-swift. So I would wear it to the clinic on those days for fun, right? The kids would come in and they’d be like, Why do we listen to Taylor Swift? Like, what’s with the shirt? And I don’t know what it was, but I read something where her brother Austin, I think, right, went to they lived in Nashville, right? And the kids didn’t know where I came from. They always just knew that I was from North, whatever. So I told them that, Oh, I stopped in Nashville. I went to Vanderbilt for a minute. Just complete bullshit. Okay. But I met her brother. We became really good friends, and Taylor and I dated behind the scenes for a little while, so I just made this story up. It was just ridiculous just to mess with these kids. Right? But then it caught on. So imagine the way that a rumor would fly through a high school, right? The best part of this was this loss leader. So the parents would start coming in and be like, well, what’s up with with little Jane? This, this and this? Well, my back kind of hurts, too, right? And it worked great for business.
Bobby Puim: But then I had like moms and dads coming and I was like, Did you date Taylor Swift? You know that the kids are talking about this, right? So end of the year, end of the first year of doing this, the golf team invites me out for a round with the team and I get to to golf with these kids. And at the end of the day, they give me the Taylor Swift Golf Award. I have it somewhere at home, right. Presented at their like awards banquet. So there’s there’s the football team getting an award and the baseball team won state and all these things like Dr. Bobby comes up and gets the Taylor Swift Award for Golf Excellence in Deer Park, Texas. It’s just hilarious. So on and on and on. I have just I’ve loved Taylor Swift anyways, and then everybody in in that particular region thinks that I dated her for a moment. So. Yes. So now it’s out that I didn’t actually date Taylor Swift.
Sam Hewit: It’s out now.
Bobby Puim: Now it’s out now.
Sam Hewit: Now it’s out now.
Sam Hewit: So, Taylor, He’s taking it back? Yeah, he’s going on the record.
Bobby Puim: On the record for all 17 of our listeners.
Sam Hewit: So you were. You were quite the story.
Sam Hewit: So you were a doctor, a chiropractic doctor, because I know there’s a lot.
Sam Hewit: Of somebody would say fake doctor. Yeah, I wasn’t I.
Sam Hewit: Wasn’t I wasn’t.
Sam Hewit: Going to say it.
Bobby Puim: Yeah, my mom would.
Sam Hewit: It’s fine. Okay.
Sam Hewit: So you were a doctor. You had the doctor title.
Sam Hewit: I do.
Sam Hewit: Still. And you lived in Texas?
Sam Hewit: I lived in Texas.
Sam Hewit: You picked the wrong football team.
Bobby Puim: I love the Texans.
Sam Hewit: And so how did you end up in Canada?
Sam Hewit: No, I’m from here.
Sam Hewit: Oh, you’re from here?
Sam Hewit: I was born and raised.
Bobby Puim: Cambridge, Ontario.
Sam Hewit: Cambridge, Ontario. And then you went. So what made you end up in just chiropractic school?
Bobby Puim: So there’s only one Chiro school in all of Canada.
Sam Hewit: Yes, right.
Sam Hewit: It’s right by the Domino’s office.
Sam Hewit: Right? Exactly.
Bobby Puim: Exactly. North York. Ontario, CMCC, Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. You apply there. And it’s everybody who doesn’t get into medical school or physical therapy school and all those schools, it’s their backup, right?
Sam Hewit: So, so highly subscribed.
Bobby Puim: It’s like 2% of applicants get in. But I went down to the US and started started researching schools. Saint Louis, Boston, La la was a disaster. And then I went to Houston and Houston actually felt a lot like home. So it’s actually very similar to to here. So cost of living was amazing. It helped me start to build a real estate portfolio and I just sort of loved it. I fell in love with everything about Texas. The only thing that wasn’t there was my family. So when my brother called in 2015 and said he was getting married and I want you to be my best man, and I had met his wife three whole times. Like I thought, you know what, dummy? Like, let’s get back home.
Sam Hewit: Yeah. So go home.
Bobby Puim: So I sort of dropped it off. But that’s when real estate really took off for me to be fair. So it’s the portfolio grew. I was I don’t have to be in a windowless room claiming to small children that I dated Taylor Swift any longer. Like it’s.
Sam Hewit: Now you’re in a.
Sam Hewit: Windowless room talking to me, talking to you. It’s the equivalent. This is a step up.
Sam Hewit: I don’t.
Sam Hewit: Know.
Bobby Puim: The only constant here is that people keep shitting on the Texans. That’s all I really So so yes. Yes. We’ve encompassed connectivity plan Taylor Swift and that the Houston Texans are definitely the best team NFL team in the state of Texas. South of Dallas, apparently. Yeah. Okay. They’re the only team south of Dallas.
Sam Hewit: Got it. I’ll give you that.
Bobby Puim: Fair enough.
Sam Hewit: Fair enough. I’ll give you that one.
Bobby Puim: Sam, you’re the best. Anybody looking to connect with Sam? royallepagesignature.com?
Sam Hewit: That is correct. Or you can find me on Instagram. I am Sam_Hewit with one T or you can find me through the Royal LePage Signature Instagram page as well. We just started a TikTok.
Bobby Puim: Are you dancing?
Sam Hewit: Tell me you’re dancing.
Sam Hewit: I will eventually dance. Right now I’m not dancing, but I will eventually dance.
Bobby Puim: I will absolutely dance on the signature TikTok.
Sam Hewit: You will? 100%. Oh, gosh.
Sam Hewit: Heard it here first.
Sam Hewit: Okay.
Bobby Puim: They won’t let me do it on the Broker’s Playbook. One.
Sam Hewit: Why?
Bobby Puim: I don’t know. Simon says that I don’t have the rhythm. I don’t. I don’t get.
Sam Hewit: It. Oh, you can only dance on the signature TikTok if you can actually dance.
Bobby Puim: Oh, it’s on, It’s on, It’s on. Mark it down. It’s on.
Sam Hewit: All right, it’s on.
Sam Hewit: I think we did. We have a friendly bet on something else, too. I feel like we bet on something else.
Sam Hewit: You and I are degenerates.
Bobby Puim: We just bet on everything.
Sam Hewit: It’s wonderful.
Sam Hewit: I think we bet on the next time the Texans play the Cowboys.
Bobby Puim: Yeah, that’s probably what it was. Amazing, Sam. Everybody knows where to connect with you. And for all the listeners, we got a version of the connectivity plan up on brokersplaybook.com right on the home page as a download for you. Amazing Sam thanks so much.
Sam Hewit: Thanks for having me.