On this edition of the MovotoMic we talk to Nikki Miller, seasoned expert in all things real estate, coaching, training, and entrepreneurship. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who is wanting to improve themselves and grow their career. For more updates follow Movoto on Instagram @movotorealestate or download the Movoto app.
Full Episode:
Full Transcript:
Patrick: Hello and welcome to Movoto Mic, a new real estate podcast brought to you by Movoto.com. My name is Patrick Kearns. I’m an ex-journalist and 10-year vet of the real estate industry currently working as Movoto’s head of communications. Here with me, as always, is my associate Sophie Brandeis. Sophie, how are you doing today?
Sophie Brandeis at 0:26
Sophie: I’m doing great today, Patrick. It’s the start of summer and we get to podcast with a podcaster. So that’s always fun.
Patrick: I love it. Who have you brought as our guest today, Sophie?
Sophie: So, coming on today, we have Nikki Miller. With over a decade of experience in real estate coaching, training, and high-level system integration, Nikki founded and served as CEO of The Lead Syndicate, a first-of-its-kind leverage platform for individual agents. Earlier this year, The Lead Syndicate was acquired by Movoto to launch Lever by Movoto. Currently, she serves as the Vice President of Lever and Agent Platforms at Movoto. Aside from being an entrepreneur, a leader, and an expert in all things real estate, Nikki is also the co-host of The One Thing Podcast, which has achieved over 11 million lifetime downloads. With that, welcome to the show, Nikki.
Nikki Miller at 1:16
Nikki: Hey, y’all. I’m so excited to be here.
Patrick: We are excited to have you. You and I share something which I think is pretty unique in the real estate industry: we both got our start in sports, which is not the most natural transition. But now, years later, we are working in the real estate industry. We can both coin ourselves ex-journalists.
Nikki: Yeah, exactly.
Patrick: Talk to me a little bit about why real estate, why you didn’t want to continue to be a journalist, sort of how you made that transition and how you decided that real estate was the thing that you actually wanted to focus your energy on.
Nikki: Yeah, I’ll give you the real honest story, like the real behind the scenes. I usually pad this up a little bit if somebody asks me, like, who knows what I used to do, but I’ll give you the real story. I got very lucky that I started as a written journalist. I wanted to actually go work for a newspaper and sort of fell into sports reporting. Frankly, the way that I fell into sports reporting was that there was nobody else who knew anything about sports and they were like, “Nikki, do you know anything about football? Can you write about this football game?” And I was like, “Yeah, I got it.”
Nikki: That turned into, and this was way back in high school, getting into sports broadcasting over radio and TV, more localized stuff. When I went to college, I thought to myself, “Well, I’d love to do both. I really love to write, but I also started to really enjoy and fall in love with doing more broadcast journalism.” By a stroke of straight luck, I got an internship with the NFL as a sideline reporter. The intent of this internship, Patrick knows this, but the whole intent of doing one of these internships is just to get repetition, right? Your goal is to get some free camera time. You’re sort of doing the grunt work. It’s like the worst job in the world, and you’re just doing a bunch of the grunt work. Your goal is to do some random interviews that you could smash together at the end of a few years for some type of highlight reel, right?
Nikki: So what ended up happening is I was spending time with the team, spending time with the reporter I was shadowing, and I ended up getting an actual opportunity to be their sideline reporter. What I realized after a couple of seasons of doing this was I really loved what I was doing, but I wasn’t in love with that. I didn’t want to work as long as I would need to work to hustle as long as I would need to hustle to actually make a career of this. And you just don’t, one does not get into journalism to make a lot of money. It does not lead you to financial freedom. Let me say it that way. And I was very clear that I wanted to live a really big life. I knew that I wanted to invest, that I wanted financial freedom, and that I wanted to have a lot of options in my life. And that meant that I needed to do well financially.
Nikki: So the actual story is that I went to the library one day. I’m a junior in college at this point, in my third season with the NFL. I went to the library one day, and I went to the section of biographies and started pulling books off the shelves and saying, “Okay, what do all these people have in common who had made a lot of money and done really well for themselves?” And guess what they all had in common? Real estate and building businesses. So I was like, “I can do that.” I double-majored in finance and went straight from college. I quit that season and everybody told me I was crazy. They were like, “This is the job of a lifetime. How could you ever quit something like this?” And I realized that I was taking somebody’s spot who really was in love with that industry and would do it for the love of it. I didn’t love it that much. I got the experience which, by the way, I think predicated a lot of my future success. I think that the experience I got there learning how to speak to people, how to write, and how to ask great questions really set me up for what my career was going to be in the future in a way that I could have never predicted or known at the time. And that’s the real story of how I got into real estate. I went straight from college to getting into the real estate world.
Patrick: I think what’s crazy is there’s such a, it’s so diametrically opposite, right? With the real estate industry, it’s so much about building your own career and sort of taking your own opportunities. But like the sports channels, I know this was the case for me when I was covering the Rangers and not making any money and mostly just freelancing and hustling. All of the beat reporters that covered the team are still the same beat reporters covering the team. You’re waiting for an opportunity to open. Basically, it’s like the beat is all a bunch of people in their mid-thirties. I’m going to be waiting 20 to 30 years before there’s even an opportunity to be a full-time beat reporter, right? So it is sort of crazy how different that is.
Nikki: 100%. But what I also tell people, I don’t know if you experienced this, Patrick, but for me, I was a sideline reporter, right? And I always try to remind everybody that that job, they go immediately to someone like Erin Andrews who’s really the poster child of what a career that could be like. She took it on to doing brand things and partnerships and things like that and has done an incredible job. But when I was doing it, it’s the worst job ever. Imagine that you’re reporting for a team, whether they win or whether they lose, right? And it just so happened, the team I was reporting for was losing a lot. So imagine, as a professional athlete, you’re literally paid to win. My job was to get them to stop and talk to me when they were completely in the zone in their game or after when they had lost and were pissed. All they wanted to do was go to the locker room and be left alone, and I had to be the one to tackle to speak to these big, huge, enormous dudes and be like, “Hey, can you stop and talk to me?” Even though I know the literal last thing you want to do is communicate with me right now and be asked these questions. Then you have to get them to be happy enough to not completely ruin their career on camera, right?
Nikki: So what it ended up predicating was not only my ability to, like I said, speak and ask questions but also my ability to talk to people and make them comfortable really fast. And to build relationships with people who may, in the moment, otherwise not be super interested in building a relationship. It sort of went directly into when I started working with home buyers and home sellers. The way I grew my whole business was door knocking, right? I literally went door to door to communicate with homeowners and talk to them about any plans they had to sell their home in the future. You have to imagine that when you’re knocking on someone’s door, you’re interrupting their day, they don’t know who you are, they don’t want to talk to you, they’re in the middle of whatever they’re in the middle of. I really pulled on all that experience, frankly just being really good at getting people to communicate with me who had no plans to and did not want to.
Patrick: I was going to point out that fact. Talking to these NFL players after their games must have given you so many takeaways to apply to the real estate industry. So you’re 22, you’re right out of college, you’re entering the world of real estate. Where are you, where do you end up, and where do you go?
Nikki: So right out of school, I grew up, was born and raised in Southern California, went to school in Southern California. Right out of college, I thought that I wanted to work more on the finance side in real estate because I always had sort of a knack for numbers. I sort of came to a logical conclusion that if I could work numbers in real estate, it would help me in the future with my investing. I went to work for a real estate investment and development firm as an underwriter. For those who don’t know, an underwriter is basically the person who runs all the numbers in a spreadsheet to make sure a deal makes sense. I was lucky enough to get my start with a very early-stage company. I was employee number three at an early-stage investment firm as their first and only underwriter. The cool thing is that normally in that environment, you’d have to work your way up to certain levels of deals. I got thrown into everything. I was doing all the deals, in all the meetings, underwriting everything. There was no level or complexity that I was not exposed to.
Nikki: In that business, the way that you really make money, the way you participate in the upside is either getting to some type of partner level or investing yourself. That was my number one goal there. I wanted to become a partner at that firm. That was literally my life’s mission at 22-year-old Nikki, that’s all I wanted to do. I went into that firm, and I kid you guys not, I was working literally seven days a week. Had there been eight days, I would have worked that one too. I was working 80 to 100 hours a week, living and breathing this business so that I could get the opportunity to become a partner. I’ll never forget the day that I got offered partnership. I was only about a year in, still about 22, maybe 23 at the time, just got offered partnership, this big goal. I go home that day and tell my boyfriend at the time, now husband, the good news. He goes, “Me too, I got a promotion and they’re moving me to Northern California.” I should have gone first. I just found out that I’m getting a partnership opportunity. At the time, the virtual world we live in now was not available. So I went back to that company and made the decision that I really liked my now husband. So I ended up working out well. But I liked him, so I said I’ll go with you. I gave up that opportunity and moved to Northern California with no job, no prospects, and no idea what I wanted to do. Completely devastated because the thing that I had worked so hard for, I got, and then basically gave up before I got it.
Nikki: So we moved to Northern California, and I thought, “What am I going to do?” I had worked so hard and thought to myself, “I don’t know if I have it in me again. I don’t know if I can replicate that same timing, same experience. And frankly, I don’t know if I love it enough to do that for another four or five years if that’s what it’s going to take.” So I thought, “OK, if my big goal is to invest in real estate and build a business, what’s something where I could kind of do both?” That’s when I got my real estate license and started my actual real estate sales career.
Sophie: I know a lot of your growth came during your time at Keller Williams. I think something that’s interesting about Keller Williams is this emphasis on education, coaching, and growth. Many of our leaders came from Keller Williams, like you, Chris, J T. But then also so much of this next generation of real estate leaders have come from Keller Williams, the Tim Hele, Ben Kinney, right, Glens, and all these people that are big movers and shakers in the real estate industry. What do you think it is about Keller Williams that has created this next generation of real estate leaders and cultivated talent?
Nikki: I think there’s a lot of elements. Talent often quests to be surrounded by other talent. Keller Williams has done an incredible job of curating an environment that allows people to succeed and define their own success. There’s nothing that talent likes more than that. I always say if you hire really talented people in your organization, your number one job is to teach them how to succeed in that organization because talented people don’t like showing up to work every day feeling like they’re losing or not knowing whether they’re winning or losing. Keller Williams does that really well, where they get to be surrounded by other talented people and have an opportunity to define their success. They also provide a lot of growth opportunities. When you get a lot of growth-minded people together and pour into them even more, helping them grow even more, it’s just a matter of time until a lot of amazing things happen. That’s why you see so many incredible leaders coming out of that environment. It’s already who they are, and most companies don’t build that environment. If they do, it’s often created by the individuals. Keller Williams has made it a foundational part of their culture, so people find their home there because it feels like a place they belong.
Sophie: I know you spent about 10 years at Keller Williams. Maybe briefly walk us through your growth there and the pain point you saw towards the end of your time at Keller Williams that led you to start Lever?
Nikki: My entire career at Keller Williams was really getting me ready to build Lever and for Lever to become what it is. Without knowing it, the idea for Lever had been with me for a long time. I started at Keller Williams as a brand new individual agent and started learning how to become a real estate agent. I was one of those crazy people that actually did what they told me to do and became very successful pretty quickly. Then I went into my manager’s office one day and said, “Hey, I’ve hit my ceiling of achievement in my business, and I’m not really sure what to do now. You haven’t led me astray yet. Tell me what to do now.” What that meant for me at the moment was that I had hit my ceiling in the number of transactions I could do by myself. So I went to her and said, “I’ve hit that ceiling, what do I do?” She said, “Now we’re going to get you a coach, teach you how to hire people, fire people, manage overhead, build systems, do marketing.” I was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no. I don’t want to do any of that.”
Nikki: At the time, I’m 23, and I’m barely responsible for myself. I shouldn’t be responsible for anybody else. I didn’t want to manage overhead or hire people. I hadn’t stepped into my entrepreneurial power yet and was like, “I’m good at one thing and one thing only, selling real estate. I’m not prepared to be a business owner.” I struggled for a while and remember going back into my manager’s office about six months later, saying verbatim, “I don’t want to do any of this. Somebody before me has figured this out, can I just pay them to do it? Does that exist?” She said, “No, you’re not allowed to do that. If you don’t want to build it yourself, if you don’t want to go through the pain of building it yourself and taking on the overhead, you could join a team.” Historically, and still true today, to join a team, you’d have to give up your brand and put your production under them. It wasn’t a financial model I was a fan of. I said, “No, I don’t want to do that.” Teams were in their early iterations then, not like the amazing high-functioning teams we see today.
Nikki: So I ended up building it out myself, became the CEO of the largest Keller Williams in California with 500 agents doing a couple of billion in sales volume a year. It was a huge company, multiple companies in one. It was there I realized this little problem I had faced as an individual agent wasn’t unique. Every agent ever was going through the same challenges, hitting the same ceilings. We would have the same conversation I had ten years ago. I thought, “There’s got to be a better way.” I remember one day, I literally still have the journal page. It’s framed on my wall because it was a pivotal moment in my career where I described exactly what Lever is today in great detail and said someone should create this. Then I thought, “Why don’t I just become the leader I’m waiting for? Why don’t I build this thing that everyone is clearly asking for?” In January 2021, I launched The Lead Syndicate, the first version of Lever.
Sophie: I have goosebumps hearing that. That’s awesome.
Patrick: It’s inspiring. One thing you touched on that’s interesting is starting the business in the midst of a pandemic. There’s a big history of danger and opportunity. During times of crisis, great opportunities present themselves. How did starting Lever during the pandemic affect your ability to get the business off the ground, and how did it feel doing something counter to what everyone else would normally do during a pandemic?
Nikki: The pandemic worked for and against me. Had I started Lever a couple of years earlier, it might not have been possible because we are so virtual. We support agents in hundreds of locations across the country, and I don’t know if the world was ready for such a virtual environment just yet. COVID propelled us into that. The only way what I do is possible is through this virtual environment we live in now because of COVID. Everybody is very comfortable with it now. However, it was probably the worst time from a real estate perspective to launch what I did because the market was so good. People think a good market is beneficial, but a really easy real estate market makes for really lazy, bad agents. Success is a terrible teacher. Agents were having their best years ever in 2021 and 2022, and business was easier than it had ever been and probably will ever be again. Getting Lever off the ground was hard because agents felt they didn’t need help.
Nikki: That all changed towards the end of 2022, and what we do really took off. Boom times lead to the death of innovation. You don’t have to disrupt anything when there’s nothing that needs to be disrupted. We look smart, but we’re not that smart. I just pay attention. As a journalist, you’re taught to pay attention to everything because you have to. One of my great skills in business and life is paying attention. When you talk to and support as many agents as I do, you see trends. You’d have to try not to see the rhythm and trends and how business behaves. For every boom time, there’s a time on the other side where life and business and the economy get more challenging. Many agents we originally met and talked to in 2021 and 2022 came back to us later, saying, “You were right. Business is really hard now, and we’re suffering because we didn’t solve these problems.” We had the opportunity to help them then, but I wish we had prevented them from going through that pain.
Sophie: Our audience is people interested in getting their foot in the door in the real estate industry. Can we go over some red flags and green flags of real estate agents?
Nikki: For sure. Let’s start with some green flags. The first question I ask someone who wants to get into real estate is, “Why do you want to do this job? And why now?” Many people say they love looking at houses or want to be like the people on Million Dollar Listing, but that’s not what we do. I want to understand their goal and why they’re getting into this business. A great answer is someone who wants financial freedom and to have the opportunity to grow as much as they are willing to create. This industry can be challenging and rewarding. The second thing I look for is someone willing to learn. I always want to be in an environment where I’m the biggest loser in the room, surrounded by people who are much smarter and more accomplished than me. I want to learn from whomever I’m in the room with. Even now, I ask a lot of questions because it’s an opportunity to learn from others. Many people struggle with not wanting to show their inexperience, which can be a detriment to their growth and opportunity. The two biggest things I look for are why someone wants to get into real estate and if they can be humble enough to be a beginner. If you can do both of those things and make peace with the fact that this industry is challenging and requires hard work, you’ll succeed.
Sophie: Red flags?
Nikki: Red flags are probably just the opposite of the green flags. People who feel the need to tell me all the things they’ve done or all the things they know are usually a big red flag. They often know very little about what they’re talking about. Part of my job as a CEO was to interview a lot of agents, particularly new agents. Those who felt the need to let me know all the ways they knew about real estate were usually a challenge for our team. They were so focused on sharing what they knew that they weren’t willing to learn what they didn’t know to be successful. People who don’t make peace with the fact that this business is challenging and requires a lot of hard work are also red flags. This business is very hard, and you have to be able to take the good days and the bad days. If you can’t handle both, it’s probably not the industry for you.
Patrick: I think that’s some phenomenal advice for aspiring real estate agents, seriously and in general.
Nikki: Business is business and life is life. There’s not a whole lot that exists in one particular silo and environment.
Patrick: Something I’ve always found unique about the real estate industry is that, theoretically, it’s very competitive. But it also gives back a lot. It’s an industry big on cooperation, sharing, coaching, and helping people become better. Can you provide insight into why you think that is?
Nikki: I think it’s because it’s hard. Anyone who’s done the hard work of building a real estate business knows how hard it is and is willing to share information with someone willing to receive it and act on it. Chris Heller and I were at an industry event, and someone stopped us in the hallway, asking for the secret to real estate. They think there’s a secret we’re not telling anyone. I always say, “Have you considered just doing the work?” There are tools, tricks, and trades to do the work at a higher level, but anyone who has built a real real estate business understands it’s hard work. We all had someone turn around and reach out their hand to help us get where we wanted to go. You have an obligation to give that back. When you’ve been helped in business and life, you have an obligation to give back. We see a lot of that in the real estate industry.
Sophie: To wrap this episode up, let’s do one last question before we go into our rapid-fire section. Can you tell us about the first house you ever sold?
Nikki: The first house I ever sold, I got from door knocking a neighborhood. One of the days I door-knocked this neighborhood, a lady screamed at me that I was trespassing and a terrible person. She even called the police on me. It was terrifying. I stopped door knocking for a couple of weeks because of that incident, but I had to get back out there. Eventually, one of the homeowners agreed to work with me, and it happened to be her next-door neighbor. The first house I ever sold was right next door to this lady. The sale itself was very normal, but it was always clouded by this lady next door. I wouldn’t even do my own open house because I was so afraid she would come in. Years later, I finally called her, and we ended up having a great conversation. I sold her house, and she was part of the reason I became successful. I sold her house and can source at least 12 or 13 sales from her directly. She is a testament to doing things when you’re scared and being curious because you never know what someone is going through.
Patrick: Wow, what a way to end. Shout out, Mary.
Sophie: Shout out, Mary.
Patrick: So, we play this little game at the end of our episodes called Let’s Get Real. We’re going to ask you three rapid-fire questions. Try not to think too much about them. You ready?
Nikki: Got it.
Patrick: Number one, you can give one piece of advice and only one piece of advice to an aspiring agent. What is it?
Nikki: Just do the work. If you want to sell more real estate, you have to talk to more people about selling real estate. That’s your job. That’s it.
Patrick: What do you think is one book that every real estate agent should read?
Nikki: Easy. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. It’s my favorite negotiation and communication book.
Patrick: You have one last day in Southern California. What are you doing?
Nikki: I think I’m going to the beach with my daughter, my husband, and my dog. We’re just running through the waves and water.
Patrick: That sounds like a wonderful day. Thank you so much, Nikki, for coming on.
Nikki: Thank you.
Sophie: Thanks for having me.
