We recently connected with Jennifer Wehner and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jennifer, thanks for joining us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?
My 19 years in real estate have been exciting, turbulent and also sometimes quite scary. I have seen up markets and down markets. I came from Riverside, California with no entrepreneurs in my family and no roadmap for success. I was a teen mom that needed a way to make money for my family. I started as a waitress, saving up tips to start a tanning salon business. It wasn’t until 2003 that I started my real estate career because some friends said that Arizona had a lot of opportunity flipping houses, so I moved and figured out how to do it as a solo agent.
I ended up buying two homes in one week with the money I was going to use for the salon.
I worked really hard because that’s what I was born to do, becoming a top producer for my brokerage at the end my first year (2004), closing 45 homes. You don’t close 45 homes by yourself without getting calls literally 24/7. When clients were calling on Thanksgiving day, that’s when I knew that I needed to leverage some of these tasks out to others. My first hire, after four months in the business was an in person assistant I found on Craigslist.
By 2005, I hired another agent I found on Craiglist over breakfast one day and just gave her every task I didn’t want to do. I bought 10 acres of land where I built eight custom homes. That year, I closed 70 homes and became the number two agent in my brokerage in addition to developing custom homes.
Then came the crash in 2008 and we were left with nothing. I had to let go my assistant and other agent and regroup completely. I negotiated short sales and REO’s by myself (once literally while I was giving birth) and couldn’t afford a team at all.
Fast forward, it’s 2011, and my husband and I had just begun making marketing videos on YouTube with the cheapest equipment we could find. A big time investor found my videos and decided he needed to work with me. We ended up flipping 50 homes that year (2011), and it saved my real estate business. On the back end, I still needed help. A client referred me to Sankshep Solutions, a Virtual Assistant company based in India. I locked myself in a room for 6 hours and created videos on how to create MLS searches, virtual tours and anything else I needed off my plate at the time. I uploaded them to an unlisted channel on Youtube and those were the best systems I had at the time.
I still use virtual assistants in my business to this day. They are a lifesaver.
This is when I started to breakdown the tasks and categorize them into the different pillars of my business. Finance, marketing, sales and operations. I started to understand that I needed to keep myself in the money making activities that I loved or I was going to burn out. I actually found that I was more profitable, the more I leveraged out. What started as hiring the broker’s TC for paperwork and compliance has now become my in house transaction department. Getting paperwork off my plate and my agent’s plates was one of the first real steps in allowing us to do more prospecting and sales. Once I got some rockstar agents in my team, I knew it was time to think bigger. We tried an integrator and an in house marketing person and in 2018, we left our brokerage and went to a mega team structure.
Now I run a team of 50 people, comprised of agents and administrative support staff. In 2020, we went from $100 million to $180 million during Covid-19. On top of that, we have been profitable. On top of that, I haven’t worked a single Sunday in five years—and almost never on Saturdays, either. In 2021, we hit $200 million and we are on track to far surpass that figure this year in 2022.
If I was starting over again today, I would have had very clear job descriptions and realistic KPI’s for every role. This allows new hires to know exactly what they will be doing every day and how they are going to be financially incentivized to do more. I would have spent more time building accountability systems that allowed me to track these specific and measurable metrics to ensure the role’s success for the organization. I would also have implemented applicant tracking systems to allow automation to do some of the candidate elimination for me. I would have established a better cadence of interview questions including more technical and hands on portions. My advice to every business owner is to have every applicant create a short video and complete a DISC assessment on every new hire so you can really understand the people who are potentially coming through your door.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
From being a waitress and teen mom in Riverside, California to becoming the CEO of a $200 million dollar a year real estate team, Jennifer Wehner has a PHD in grit. Jennifer got into real estate in 2003 as she saw an immense opportunity for investment in this space. Within her first year, she became the top agent in her office and developed a passion for helping others find their dream homes and build their net worth. In her 19 years in the business, she has been through the greatest ups and downs the market has had to offer. From REOs and short sales to flipping homes, commercial real estate and everything in between, Jen’s real estate career has been highly versatile. She kept her business alive through being on the cutting edge of digital marketing tactics including blogging, video and internet lead generation. In 2014 she started her team, The Wehner Group. In 2020 The Wehner Group sold 373 homes and over $178M in real estate volume, growing it to nearly $200M in 2021. In addition to building her own team, Jennifer serves as a coach and mentor to other agents across the country. Jennifer is dedicated to helping agents create their own extraordinary real estate businesses, allowing them to leave a legacy, build a healthy lifestyle and empower their clients to do the same. Jennifer is a wife, mother of four, skydiver, biohacker, serial entrepreneur, and has an upcoming book, The Renaissance Real Estate Agent, coming out soon!
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the biggest lessons I had to unlearn was my story. Every day you wake up and things happen to you. There is an objective truth to the content of these events and then there is your life, which is created through the stories you tell yourself about these events. Our brains have to make sense of the massive stimuli and traumatic events we experience and this becomes our life story. We make decisions based on this narrative of who we tell ourselves we are. We are the biggest gate keepers to our success in life. We call this, limiting beliefs. I didn’t come from money. Not a single member of my family had ever started a business or attempted to make money on a large scale. The lesson I had to unlearn came from dismantling the lies I was telling myself. “You’ll never make it.” “You’ll never amount to anything.” “You can’t have that nice thing”. As soon as I opened my mind to other opportunities, believing I was capable and deserving of them, my world started to grow. I started to think bigger and my business exploded. Tame these limiting beliefs in your life and the ceiling on your success will vanish.
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
I was 19, pregnant and absolutely directionless in life. I started working as a waitress. It wasn’t my favorite but I was good at it. I painstakingly saved every cent that wasn’t going towards raising my child. I knew this money was going to buy us a better future. Within a few years, I had saved up $14,000 in tips from waitressing. I knew I wanted my own business, so I was pricing out tanning salons in California, where I lived at the time, thinking that was my ticket to becoming a small business owner.
Just before making the commitment, my husband had some friends who were flipping homes in Arizona and making good money. When I looked into it, I discovered that we could pay two mortgages for homes in Arizona for less than what we paid in rent on an older, dated home in Huntington Beach. I immediately saw the opportunity and seized it. I ended up buying two homes in one week with the money I was going to use for the salon and never looked back. That is what started my 19 year career in real estate.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wehnergroup.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jennifer.wehner/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenniferwehnerscottsdalerealestate
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheWehnerGroupeXpRealty
Image Credits
Dana Bruhn & SheaLyn Anderson