Tim Davis Teaches Real Estate Agents the Power of Personal Branding
Contact your local Movement Mortgage office to find out how to have Tim come to train your agents.
What follows is a computerized transcription of our conversation. Please excuse the typos!
Frank Felker 00:24
Welcome back to Radio Free Enterprise. I am very excited to introduce my next guest, Tim Davis, of Personal Branding Mastery. Tim helps real estate agents create a compelling personal brand that positions them head and shoulders above their competition and drives a nonstop stream of new clients through the door. He’s here to talk about his soon to be published book, Personal Branding Mastery, and to tell us how he works his magic for those realtors. Tim, welcome to Radio Free Enterprise.
Tim Davis 00:53
Frank, I can’t tell you how grateful I am to be a part of your show today. Thank you so much for extending an opportunity for me to come on.
Frank Felker 01:00
Well, I am very grateful to have you here, Tim, because your message is something I’m anxious to hear about. And I know, our listeners are going to get a lot from you as well. So let’s get started. Like you. I have many, many years of experience, trying at least to help real estate agents with their marketing. But you’ve taken a very specific tack with personal branding for real estate agents. And I want you to start out by telling us a little bit about specifically who you’re able to help and what it is that you do for
Tim Davis 01:32
Sure. Yeah. So my marketplace really is real estate agents. And what I help the agents that are really wanting to find a way to stand out from the sea of competition that’s out there amongst them. So my target market, it really becomes that real estate agent that really wants to know, how do I get my message out? And how do I really separate myself from the competition in such a way that it makes it painfully obvious for the customers to say yes, to me, first,
Frank Felker 02:03
painfully obvious delightfully. There certainly is a lot of competition out there in the in the real estate agent marketplace. And I can see where what you’re doing could have a tremendous impact. Now, how did you originally get into this what brought you to personal branding and what brought you to focusing on real estate agents.
Tim Davis 02:29
So I got into the mortgage industry, really, I was talked into it, I didn’t grow up playing mortgage loan officer in the backyard or anything like that. But a friend taught me into the business back when my early 20s. And I won’t date myself here on your show. But in the mortgage industry, it wasn’t too dissimilar from real estate. Obviously, real estate agents were one of our main targets, we wanted to build relationships with real estate agents, I found that mortgage lending was highly competitive as well seem like there was a period of time where, you know, if you just went out your front door, you might run into three mortgage lenders, before you got to the quick sack or the grocery store. It seemed to be everywhere, it seemed to be a sea of competition, I felt trapped myself. And as I met with real estate agents and talked with real estate agents, I found that they felt the same way they felt that there was a lot of competition in the marketplace. But there was one common denominator, each one of them felt like that they could serve the client at a higher level. It’s just that they couldn’t get the clients to see that themselves. The clients were seeing them as one in the same. And I felt the same way. I felt like you know, I really could serve my clients at a higher level.
How do I get them to see that in me? And it was really an exercise in being the guinea pig myself, Frank, I tried things out myself. So if you go back to 911, when that tragedy happened, what happened in the monetary markets were rates begin to drop dramatically. And so we had this incredible increase in phone calls. But at the same time, we also had consumers that were uncertain, they didn’t know who to choose, they would call us they would call three others. And so I was I felt like this hamster in a wheel to spin in my, my legs all day long. And so I began by simply creating an audio program called 10 questions you need to know to get the best deal on your mortgage loan.
Frank Felker 04:35
Oh, that’s great. I love that.
Tim Davis 04:36
Yeah. And I really I did it intentionally as a way to sort of I was getting all these phone calls and I’m like, well, could I could I possibly come up with a solution that would position me in a little bit higher level of influence Can I get them to see me different than everybody else that they were calling and get them get out of the commodity trap which real estate agents find themselves in as well and back then Frank, I literally what I had to do is I didn’t know how to get the CDs replicated. And so computers were at the time, they were just starting to come out with the CD ROM drive that would actually record a CD.
Frank Felker 05:13
Didn’t you say you didn’t want to date yourself on this interview now?
Tim Davis 05:15
Exactly. It’s not working out too well.
Frank Felker 05:17
I’m with you, though there brother.
Tim Davis 05:19
And so I bought a computer that would record a CD and only do one at a time. And then I went to staples and I found the recordable CDs, you could buy them like 10, for like $30, they were very expensive back then. And I bought a Neato label maker, that you could make the labels for the CDs. And I would burn one at a time. And I would be very careful to put the CD of the label on there just right, because if it got a crinkle in it, then it was a bad CD, in my opinion. And so I tried to replicate my CD to look like other CDs I had seen in the marketplace, in such a way that it brought credibility. In other words, we’re used to seeing CDs out there, and we give those a certain level of influence in our life. And I thought if I could replicate that visually, I would maybe receive the same level of influence. And guess what it started to happen, I literally started to have different conversations, higher level conversations with consumers. And I could really feel how they how they started to see me more as a trusted authority than just another guy schlepping mortgage loans. And, and that’s how it started, I thought, well, this would work for me, it would certainly work for real estate agents as well. And that was the very beginning of personal branding mastery, and how it started.
Frank Felker 06:36
That’s a great story. And obviously a success story, a case study of how you put this process to work for itself for yourself. And it worked. Now, before we talk about what you do, you know, and how you’re able to help real estate agents achieve that same change in the conversation that you talked about. I always like to start with this. What is the biggest thing right now that’s preventing them from creating the kind of personal brand that will have the same sort of acceleration effect on their business? What is in general, stopping real estate agents from doing exactly what you did?
Tim Davis 07:14
It’s this false sense, or ideal out ideology, if you will, I can’t even pronounce I shouldn’t use big words, I should just keep it. But it’s this false ideology, that that they believe that it’s some kind of like braggadocious or egocentric self-promotion. And they fall into this trap, that they should be humble and not this braggadocious ego driven person. And really, that really traps them from actually taking the content they already have and distributed it into channels that increase influence. And so I really work with them to try to get them to overcome that mindset by really asking them to reposition their thinking as more as an educator and advocate for the success of their clients versus the thinking that they believe that that’s some kind of like egotistical. braggadocious self-promotion deal.
Frank Felker 08:10
I love that educator and advocate for their clients. Yeah, that’s not that’s not being bragging on yourself. that’s helping other people out. Absolutely. Yeah. So go ahead. No,
Tim Davis 08:23
I’ve said it’s really just a shift in their thinking to get them off of the thinking of it’s an ego thing and into the thinking that it’s an educational thing.
Frank Felker 08:31
Well, it sounds like right, there’s the rub, you know, is it that you get them to get around that to get over themselves and get past the fear of self-promotion, and get themselves into a mindset of being an educator and an advocate?
Tim Davis 08:44
Well, you know, by by being leading by example, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, if you go back into my background, I was a broke kid from the projects, I started working at 16 just to put food on the table for our house, not because I really wanted to go work, I’d much rather be at the ball ball field, my friends, but I had to go to a grocery store and bag or sort bottles in a stockroom just to make $2.15 an hour to put food on our table. And if you know I’ve lived it, right, so I know what it feels like to have a customer call you. You get involved in this conversation with them. And then they turn around and choose somebody else. And I know what that disappointment feels like and that frustration, especially when you feel as if you could serve them better. And so I get it, I get it from their vantage point. And because I understand that I understand the pain and the disappointment that comes with every time a customer chooses someone else instead of you. I feel like I can relate in that sort of format and then I just teach them what I did. It’s not rocket science. It takes just a little bit of courage to step outside the box. And just Take the content, you already know that you’re already giving people verbally or through telephone conversations and package it in such a way that they see it as influential and will choose you. So my biggest thing is just being the example. I’m the first guinea pig out there. And I’ll try it first myself before I’ll teach it to somebody else.
Frank Felker 10:21
Can you give us a couple of examples? I mean, you’ve, you’ve said this a couple of times taking content that you already have, and repackaging it and putting it into a different channel and etc, etc. And for you know, marketing geeks like you and I, we know what that means. But what does it mean to your average real estate agent out there? What kind of content? Are you talking about? What kind of packaging what kind of channels? Okay,
Tim Davis 10:45
so let’s just take a very simple case study that I did myself that anybody could do right now, a real estate agent could literally do this from their home computer this afternoon and be in the marketplace. Before, before five o’clock. Perfect. All right. So we’ve all seen brochures, and we’ve all seen flyers, and probably if you’re a real estate agent, you might have one of those or the other. And here’s the thing, everybody’s used to seeing a flyer, everybody’s used to seeing a brochure. And so mentally, when a consumer gets that type of information in that format, they already place it into the advertisement marketing category. So in their psychology, they’re already saying, I’m number 10. Frank, I’m pretend you’re a real estate agent, I get your flyer. I’m like, okay, here’s a flyer from Frank, and he’s trying to pitch me and sell me on his services. That’s where my mindset goes immediately. Right? Sure,
11:39
I get you.
Tim Davis 11:40
What if we took that same content, that same content that you’re putting into, into a flyer, and take an open up Microsoft Word, and rewrite it in terms of an article and model it after an article that you see in a magazine, I did this myself, what I did was, I bought a magazine, and I looked at the way articles were written. And there are two columns, and they have an author bio, and they have this headline. And all you have to do is visually look at an article in a magazine. Well, Microsoft Word will, will allow you to recreate that by typing something out and split it into two columns. So you can literally just take a Tony Robbins success principle, model success, and model your flyer in terms of what it would look like if it was an article in a magazine, create your headline, an author bio, your two-column article. And then if you’ll print it off on more of a glossy finish type of paper, just like you would see in a magazine. Now all of a sudden, you go to a networking event, or you meet a consumer or a prospect, and you hand them that it’s the exact same content just showcased in a format that they already trust.
Frank Felker 13:01
That’s I love that What a perfect example. That’s great.
Tim Davis 13:04
Anybody can do that this afternoon. I did that myself. And I saw an immediate change in the response at my local networking group of how people saw me.
Frank Felker 13:13
That’s so funny. I don’t know why that tickles me so much. I guess it’s because it’s so simple. And, and obviously, the simple, obvious, nobody does it. But even though it’s simple and obvious, and clearly would be extremely effective, I get that. That’s a great, great example, but
Tim Davis 13:29
very, very easy for anybody to do this afternoon.
Frank Felker 13:32
So let’s say that somebody who’s listening right now has made the decision Tim’s right I got to do this, I have to boost my personal brand, I’ve got to elevate myself above the sea of competition. They’ve made the decision, they’re ready to create that powerful personal brand. What are the most important things they have to do?
Tim Davis 13:53
Well, number one, I teach everybody to start with their story because their story is unique and not replicatable. In other words, nobody else has the same story as you. And most people, especially real estate agents, they dismiss the power of their story. Let me give you a real good example. And one of the exercises I teach in our seminars is to write out your story. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m not the grammar police. It can be two or three sentences. We’re not writing a novel, but I want to know what brought you to this point in your life. And I gave this exercise to a real estate agent. And he came back a few days later and said, here’s my story. It’s not much to read about and everybody’s dismissive of their story. But here’s the power in your story. Your story, not only is it unique to you, but it has connection points that will connect you on a personal level to people. And there’s nothing more powerful than a personal connection. And I’ll illustrate it really quickly. I’m a Dallas Cowboy fan.
Now people listening to that had two reactions. Oh my gosh, you got to be kidding me. Another one. Oh, that’s he’s a Cowboys fan. I am too. Well, I learned a long time ago that there was a distinct separation. And that and me just saying that. But people in the room that are Cowboys fans, we have a niche, an instant bond and instant connection and it cannot be broken. Doesn’t matter what our religious background is what our political Brett guarantee is, together, we would sit and watch Tony Romo throw an interception and break our heart at the end of the game. we would do that. Because that’s a common connection. Well, stories have that same sort of thing. You may be passionate about dogs, you may be passionate about a charity, you may have had a challenging part of your life that other people connect with. So this agent rang me back his story. And he’s very dismissive about it. He’s like, Tim, it’s not much to talk about, I don’t know why you’re making me do this, and etc, etc. And frankly, I start to read the story and get this. At 16 years old, this gentleman had to leave his home because it was so abusive. He couldn’t stay there any longer. And he went to live with friends on a farm. Now that’s Wow, that’s traumatic. But get this. Not only did he lived through that he made it to college and actually got to play NFL football. Wow. Wow is right. Now he’s dismissive of that. Right? From there, he goes out into the into the business world, they start several companies, which led him up to finally becoming a real estate agent, and a toe this gentleman I said, that is so powerful. We should condense that down to homeless at 16. NFL at 23. Now helping you find the perfect home for your family.
Frank Felker 16:42
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s great.
Tim Davis 16:45
He gets more conversations started. Because that simple tagline. If people want to know more about the story, I’ve sure to myself,
Frank Felker 16:54
I can tell you that. Absolutely.
Tim Davis 16:54
Facts tell but stories they sell. And so now all of a sudden, he’s having more conversations and more engagements. And you know, if you’re in the world of sales, more conversations lead to more opportunities. Absolutely. And by him just using that, that story. Now, all of a sudden, he’s real, and he’s authentic, and nobody can duplicate that. So that’s where I start with everybody start with your story.
Frank Felker 17:18
That’s great. And again, that’s something everybody can do this afternoon.
Tim Davis 17:22
Absolutely. It doesn’t take anything but a little bit of courage.
Frank Felker 17:26
Well, Tim, I can’t believe we’ve run through our time so quickly. There’s a couple last things though, I do want to bring up with you. First off, you’re a Dallas Cowboys fan? I am. You know, I’m in Washington DC right now.
Tim Davis 17:39
That’s okay.
Frank Felker 17:41
We can Can you hold that against me?
17:45
That’s okay.
Frank Felker 17:47
In any event, I tell you, I think you and I could talk on and on and on about this. And I really am getting a lot from what you’re sharing. But we only have a limited amount of time to work with. So sure, if somebody out there has been listening, and they want to learn more about what you do and how you can help them build a more powerful personal brand for themselves. What’s the best thing for them to do? How can they get in touch with you?
Tim Davis 18:12
Absolutely. So we have a website personal branding mastery.com. And they can register for free and get our weekly personal branding tips newsletter, it’s emailed out there to them. And then subsequently, from that, if they’re on that list, they’re going to know when we’re going to have a personal branding mastery seminar for free in their area. We just finished one in Knoxville, we’ve got another one coming up in Lexington, Kentucky. And through my coaching with movement mortgage, we are constantly hosting free personal branding mastery seminars in cities where our mortgage offices are located for real estate agents. But if they’ll go to personal branding, mastery, calm and get on the list, they’ll know when one’s coming to their area. Plus, they’ll get a lot of valuable tips along the way.
Frank Felker 18:56
That’s great. Could you just give us a real quick synopsis of what happens at these seminars?
Tim Davis 19:01
Well, we have a lot of fun. And if you thought that the couple of tips we talked about today with just the the way to reformat your brochure, and also your story that is such a small minute part of the entire seminar, it will last for about three hours. People are on the edge of their seats, they’re having a lot of fun. They’re taking a lot of notes, and we go through soup to nuts, A to Z, how to build your brand from the story all the way through your image to your positioning, packaging and marketing and promoting in the marketplace. You’ll leave with everything that you need to know there’s it’s an amazing time together.
Frank Felker 19:40
And how long does that take?
Tim Davis 19:42
It’s about a three-hour seminar. Three and a half. Yeah,
Frank Felker 19:45
I’m not surprised. That’s a lot of information, a lot of value and would take some time to get that all out.
Tim Davis 19:50
Yeah, but don’t want to come if we’re if one of our movement mortgage officers is hosting one of the personal branding mastery seminars in their city. They’re going to want to come and Frank it’s crazy at They’re always standing room only in Knoxville, we had 97 agents, we had to bring in other chairs to the room, just to get people, you know, have them have a seat. It was crazy. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s all about giving them value. So they walk away, and they know that afternoon exactly what they need to do to build a brand.
Frank Felker 20:19
That’s great, Tim. Well, I thank you so much for taking the time to be with me on Radio Free Enterprise today, Tim, I certainly got a lot out of it. And I know that real estate agents out there listening are going to get a lot of value from what you’ve had to share.
Tim Davis 20:33
Right. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate the opportunity to come on and share. My
Frank Felker 20:37
pleasure to look forward to speaking to you again soon. Thanks, buddy. That’s it for this episode of Radio Free Enterprise for the rest of you cats and kittens out there until next time, I’ll see you on the radio.
20:50
All Frankie all the time Radio Free Enterprise
