Smash Notes
How to Get People to Say Yes | Ryan Serhant
Ryan Serhant is a real estate broker, founder of SERHANT., and star of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York and Netflix’s Owning Manhattan. He explains how to sell without making people feel sold to: build a connection, help first, and earn the right to ask. He also breaks down the psychology of attention and persuasion, showing how to get people's…
People
Notes
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On the show, fake it till you make it implies lying, and lying is the worst thing for an independent contractor, an entrepreneur, or anyone who has had to sell. Everything sounds great until someone lies to your face. The alignment is with future me. The person on display is the person he will become 12 to 24 months from now. He has written it down and he will manifest it. He says he might not become the exact person he thought he would be, and he does become some alternate reality version of that person.
In 2010, Bravo held an open casting call for the New York version of Million Dollar Listing. The network was franchising the show and wanted the best, brightest, and hungriest real estate agents under the age of 30. He had been in the business for 18 months. He got his license the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy because he needed to pay rent. He was acting in the city, had no money, and did not want to move home. A friend said to get a real estate license, memorize information, and play yes and improv games on the street with new clients every day. Rent apartments, take a small percentage of the commission, and pay the bills.
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Ryan Serhant left the people booked for his next showing in the apartment because people want what they cannot have. Surprise them, he says, and they do not know what to do, so they double down their focus on you.
He went to the bathroom and broke into a full sweat, with the whole plan set and no idea what came next. He remembered a date in New York about a year earlier. They talked for about five minutes, she left for the bathroom, came back, said something had come up, walked out, and ghosted him before ghosting was even a phrase. In the bathroom he decided to do what she had done to him. He told the group he knew they were booked and scheduled for the next showing, that something urgent had come up, and that he was sorry if it was not going to work out. He went downstairs, left them in the apartment, got in the Range Rover, ran a red light, and was gone. They went on to everybody else who really tried and really wanted it. They called the next day and said they would film the first season with four of them. They had brought the group down to four, and one of the four would not be in the final cut.
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"Don't act like the person you used to be. Act like the person you're going to become." Ryan Serhant says that mental shift alone will carry you forward, because the world is attracted to confidence and competence. Be competent while being humbly confident, and people will give you the things you want and the things you ask for. You will do more business, and you will be happier.
The choice is the same as sitting where you can look left and see rain and clouds, or look right and see sunshine. You have to pick every day. The approach worked. He did that TV show for 10 years, then three spinoff shows, and now there is a Netflix show. He started a company. He wakes up, follows his calendar, and goes from there.
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Ryan Serhant wakes up and writes that he is the CEO of his own bank of time. He has a thousand fresh dollars and has to use them wisely. Unused dollars get invested into tomorrow. If someone ruins them, it is fine and it does not mean anything. The habit helped him become so much more productive. Meetings turned into 15 to 30 minutes, and days became 15-minute increments, so he could do 10 times more in one day than anybody else. He was not necessarily doing more. He was valuing his time more. He held himself and his time to the highest regard in as humble and nice a way as he can, and he never walks in to announce 14 minutes and say go.
Offering somebody less time means they take less time. Most people are thankful, not rude. Small talk stays, because small talk is great. Unnecessary, unproductive talk goes. He hates wasting time, refuses to waste anybody else's, and does not think anyone else should waste his.
In 2018, a rough year for real estate in New York, he thinks he crossed 800 million in sales. He was by far the least connected, and the team outsold the next highest sales team by what he thinks was 350 million dollars, almost a million dollars a day. He swears the gap came from a team that ran like a machine on a high value currency of time, while everybody else would just go show, stay busy, and take their time, which he says maybe is healthier.
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On the show, the first move is the two Cs: find something in common and give a compliment. The goal is to disarm the other person. People like compliments, even when they say not to sell them. Common ground is often the house, the street, a job, a birthday, or an astrological sign.
Next is the question game. Never ask a question someone can answer with no. Ask questions and let people talk. Adults, especially men, love the sound of their own voice. Let them talk, learn about them, find more in common, and talk about everything but the sale.
The closing method is CODO, close on day one. Lay out how the work goes and what happens next, so making a friend does not leave the next steps unsaid, and so time is not wasted. A lot of people like to waste time. The pace depends on the asset, the price, the location, the interest, the activity, and the stage being set. Some products sell themselves because they are beautiful and well priced, and the art is who to sell to. When a product is incredibly overpriced and no one wants it, the sale comes down to experience: sell the lifestyle, the opportunity, and the dream. People who are terrible at sales try to sell the bed, then the dream someone can have in it. Sell the dream first, the bed second.
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On the show, ego kills more deals than anything. It kills more careers and more relationships too. People put themselves first all the time, carry a much higher sense of self than the world does, and everyone wants to win.
Asked how to handle a large agent ego, buyer ego, and seller ego on a sale of 20 to 100 million dollars, the answer is to over-communicate all day, every day, respect everyone, and kill bees with honey. Partner with the ego and praise them constantly. In the NBA finals, someone has to lose. In most business transactions, you only win if the other side wins too. A real estate sale works the same way, and even a short sale is a win for the bank once it is off the balance sheet. Play for the other side to win at all times, then laugh all the way to the top of the charts and to the bank.
The same rule has been the operating style all along. Keep friends close, and keep enemies even closer.
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Ryan Serhant split the workday in 2013 into building the brand, expanding the business, sales, and doing the work. After the show came out, he waited for the phone to ring. It did not ring, because no one calls the people they see on TV. He saw the power of content to commerce right away.
On Twitter and Facebook, before Instagram, he saw early social growth among buyers, sellers, and other people in real estate. Instagram comes out in 2013. Real estate is incredibly expensive, not like selling 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, or 100 dollar goods. He sells homes from 500,000 dollars to 20 million dollars, and he is not really selling homes at that price on Instagram. The more people who know what he sells, the better. He can generate lead flow in his sleep, because he can create the reality and then the perception of the reality every day. He can brand and expand, brand and expand.
Instagram then came out and changed the game. It was a visual medium, his world, and the first time a beautiful home was visually democratized in the palm of everyone's hand. It had never happened before. A following was already building from being on TV, and the show came out every year, so he leaned in as hard as possible. A couple of years later, reality TV takes a long time, because you shoot and it comes out the next year.
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Ryan Serhant says the most valuable asset in any business is distribution. You can have the greatest product of all time, and if no one knows about it and no one buys it, you have an unknown product that does not sell, and that is a bankrupt business. He says he got super lucky on the back of early Instagram and early YouTube, building a real estate brand on personality that ran from content to community to commerce.
He doubled down on YouTube to be first to market, capture consumer mindshare, and turn the brand into a business. By 2015, 16, and 17, every seller and every developer he worked with was writing addendums into standard old school exclusive listing agreements. The clients included billionaires and some of the biggest developers in New York and other markets. The addendum said Ryan will post property tours of the building on his personal YouTube, and they will give the building deal.
Buying advertising pushes a message onto people, and you have to repeat it over and over before they pay attention. Social and the power of PR is pull. Serhant pulled people into the stories day in and day out. The same real estate distribution funnel still runs, now at a much more massive scale, and you could not buy it because it is a concentrated audience.
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On The Knowledge Project, Ryan Serhant divides success into micro success and macro success. He counts the conversation itself as a success. Big-picture success, he says, is a happy legacy: leaving something behind, whether with his daughter or with people he has been able to help at work.
On the personal side, he names family and legacy, and maybe leaving the world in a better place than they found it, along with opportunities they otherwise would not have. At work, he was asked about the chip on his shoulder. He says the chip could rub people the wrong way because it might feel incredibly ambitious. He then points to how many other people win when he wins, to the thousands of percent, and he calls that pure, brutal responsibility.
He says he now has a responsibility to people he works with directly and to people he employs indirectly, and he does not want to waste the opportunity.
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