Name: jeff kuzmich - Migrate_Podcast_Mauricio_Umansky_12092025_5148429
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T06:25:11.555Z
Duration: 31 min 30 s
Description: jeff kuzmich - Migrate_Podcast_Mauricio_Umansky_12092025_5148429

Transcript for "jeff kuzmich - Migrate_Podcast_Mauricio_Umansky_12092025_5148429": Hey everybody and welcome to the Paychex Thrive podcast. My name is Gene Marks. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a great guest that I've already talked to and I want to share with you a little bit as a preview what we're going to be talking about. Mauricio Ormanski is a real estate agent, businessman, and television personality. Perhaps you've seen him on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but also he is starring as the co founder and chief executive officer of the agency. He is also the author of the deal maker, how to succeed in business and life through dedication, determination, and disruption. Richie and I had a conversation about real estate, specifically real estate sales. This guy has built a company with a 150 employees, 3,000 agents around the world in many, many different offices. He knows the real estate market. My interest in was talking to him about, how he hires people and how he motivates people and what makes a good salesperson. So if you're looking to get the most out of your salespeople and also learn a little bit about the real estate biz and where the economy is going related to real estate, our each year provides some great insights. So without further ado, let's get to the conversation. Welcome to Thrive, a paycheck's business podcast, your blueprint for navigating everything from people to policies to profits. And now your host, Gene Marks. So first of all Mauricio, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really really pleased to have this conversation with you. I'm so excited to be here and, let's have some fun and let's see if we can deliver something where people get excited about learn a little. Okay. Let's not go overboard here. It's just a conversation about real estate, but we'll do our best. Okay. So tell us tell us a little bit about yourself. How'd you get into the business and tell us about, you know, your firm? Yeah. Well, got into the business approximately twenty nineteen ninety six, whatever that is now almost almost thirty years ago now. Yeah, Time flies, but I was in the clothing industry before and I actually started a clothing company, sold the clothing company and then I was hired by one of the largest clothing companies in Los Angeles to mimic and copy the clothing company that I started, but it was a struggle, it was in the late 90s, I don't know, in the early 90s, and I don't know if you remember, there was a huge recession back then, and ultimately they closed my division, I got fired right before Christmas, super stressed, had to find the next thing to do. My brother-in-law was in the real estate brokerage, I was always good at sales, that's what I really loved, the sales. Know, the fact that I was in the clothing industry gave me an opportunity to start to grow brands, understand fashion, and that was great, right? So I loved architecture, I loved design, always one of my favorite things to do and I love sales. So I went to go work for my brother-in-law at Hilton at Highland twenty nine years ago and I started selling real estate and I'm happy to say that, you know, the first year I did that, I made a $181,000 and I made a promise to myself after that year that I would never earn less the following year than the previous year. And I kept that promise for twenty nine years, and it's been good. In 2007, I earned the distinction of being the number one real estate agent of Los Angeles and number three in the country. That year, I sold $650,000,000, $6.50 plus million dollars of real estate by myself without any teams or anything like that. And, yeah, so that's kind of and then, you know, taking it to the agency, Gene, you know, that's when I reached that level, I decided that I want that all of that what what I did to get there were techniques that were teachable and repeatable, they were not unique to me. And so I thought, I was thinking to myself, you know, I could chase number one, or I could use everything that I've learned, teach it, repeat it, create a company, and grow it. And so that's what we did in 2011. I started the agency, took me four years, you know, from the 2007, it was really a three year mark, And then we started the agency in 2011. Right. So how big is the company now? Like how many employees? Yeah, the company today has approximately 150 employees and 3,000 agents around the world. Unbelievable. So you started this on your own and you build it to that level. So I have a lot of questions about that. First of all, you've been doing this for a long time. Is being a good salesman something that you learn or is it something that you're born with? What do you look for when you're trying to hire people to sell for you? Well, I think there's certain traits that you're born with that you kind of that are hard to teach. But I think there's a lot of things that are teachable and repeatable and you can learn them. Right? But, you know, having the drive, having the to succeed and to count on your own, you you're in essence an entrepreneur when you're a salesperson. You earn money on commissions, you don't earn a paycheck, right? So you're only as good as your last sale, you're only as good as your next sale, your pipeline, all of that stuff, and a lot of people just can't stomach, you know, particularly when you're getting started, you know, not earning money for months before you make your next commission check, and they don't realize how hard that is. It's just very difficult to stomach, so that takes a special character trait. But there's a lot of things that are teachable. Business organizations, administration, marketing, know, ops, you know, how to do get things done, lead generation, there's a lot of things that are definitely teachable that you have to learn, and that you can't just, you know, know them innately. But you've got to be born with something, you know, that's a competitive edge, some sort of charisma, and some sort of self, not awareness, but self confidence that allows you to know that you're gonna be able to make the next sale, that you're gonna be able to rely on yourself to earn a living. So, you know, I actually I'd like to stay on on this topic of salespeople only because I mean, Maurice, you're so many of my clients struggle with this. And I know a lot of people watching and listening this, they run businesses, they struggle with salespeople. I mean, you're you're different. Like you were hungry. You're probably greedy, you you went after money, were entrepreneurial, you know, you were greedy. The way, I got to stop you on that. Zero greed, I actually think that greed is a character trait that makes a good salesman, but I believe that there are good character traits and negative character traits. Greed is what I consider a negative character trait. It does make you a good salesman, but that's what I consider to be a negative trait versus a good trait. I guess it's like a balance of greed though, right? I mean, there's, you know, clearly you want somebody who's gonna be hungry and wants to make money and always wants to do something more. But then again, you've got, know, when somebody's selling a customer something just for the money or just for the commission, it's got to be right for the customer. So there is that balance, right? Well, there's a great balance on that, and it also depends on what you're selling. What widgets you're selling. From our perspective in real estate, and the way the agency is, we're selling hospitality, service, we're selling super high, I mean we're ultra high end, we're the largest sales, average sales price in the country. Right. And so we're selling luxury high end and hospitality is critical. And so it's not about living off of one sale because those one sales turn into referrals, everybody knows each other, particularly at a certain high level, that world starts becoming smaller and smaller, and you want to protect your reputation. So it's not about just pounding through a sale and having that greed and getting through it, but rather giving such incredible hospitality, incredible service, incredible knowledge, the drive to succeed, the drive to know how to push a deal forward with elegance, right? That's the difference between luxury and they're not because luxury is not a price point, luxury is a service. Right. What do do with the salesperson of ours here that just, I mean, you said to be in this conversation, you never wanted to sell less than you did the year before. You always wanted to grow, grow, grow. Right? There is, you know, there's a demographic of salespeople that, don't know, they get to a certain level. They're fat and happy. They're, know, they're at a certain and they're just they coast. Yeah. What do you do about those kinds of people? How do you know? Well, we try to educate them. We try to motivate them. We try to get them, but there is, that's gonna be, you know, there's a group, by the way, that's what separates, you know, the top from the bottom. Why there's an opportunity to have top and that's why there's bottom. And quite honestly, it doesn't take a lot to be at the top because most people are not very motivated. Most people, I cannot tell you how many people at my company make a nice sale, and I see them, and I won't see them for two weeks, and they'll come back ten, and I'll be like, Where'd you go? They're like, Cabo. I'm like, Well, what happened to your next sale? You're living, so it's a drive, it's a plateau, but that is definitely what separates that top 2%, and that's why the top two, the top 5% does 80% of the business, that's why the rest of them do 20% of the business. Right. Do you fire people if they're not performing or if they're not hitting quotas? All the time because people cost you money no matter what, even though they're independent contractors, they cost you space, they cost you money, they cost resources. Even when they're not doing anything, want research, they want analysis, they want services, they want to do something and they're still not making any money. So we're servicing agents all the time and if they're not making money, we let them go all the time. Fair enough. What about what about like bad actors as well? I mean, how about, you know, you know, again, people struggle where you say you've got somebody that's a performer, the guy's a producer, but I don't know. Guy's a jerk or does he get along with people or the other people in the office hate them, but the guy produces. Like, you you you've had to have come across those kinds of situations. Time. What do you do? All the time. And, you know, the reality is on that, that it's all about the culture of the business that you're building. Right? And then you've got to stick to your culture. There's some businesses that they're good with that. They're good with the jerk, with the asshole. I can tell you that our rule number one, and it's on everybody's independent contractor agreement, is no assholes. And it's on there, like we have it, we post it, we actually talk about it, we don't pretend not to say that, And we've come across many situations where we've had top real estate agents, top salespeople, that make us a lot of money, where they were bad actors. And we've had to let them go in order to protect that. I can tell you that when you dare to be bad, okay, when you dare to be bad, actually end up with excellence, okay. And what happens is that, I mean, can tell you we let go, I remember one particular situation, we let go of a salesperson, they were crushing it for us, we needed their money, it was early in our world, and we let them go, we just said, you know, we're either, this is the moment of truth, we're either gonna live by our rule number one or we're not gonna live by our rule number one. 30 figure is that bad. That we did. And we let them go. And sure enough, after we let them go, the phone started to ring with other salespeople with other real estate agents saying, I really love everything you guys are doing. I was not at your company because of that person that you have. Now that you let them go, I'd like to come to your company. And we actually ended up 10 x ing our revenue, our commissions, from the person that we let go. So you got to stick to your guns. Okay. Your business also is I mean, it's ruthlessly competitive. And if I'm working for you and I'm selling for you, and again, I know you've hit this situation a lot. You know, at some point, I'm gonna be like, why am I selling for this guy? I could be going out and doing this stuff on my own. How do you handle those situations? Are you you a big non compete person? Do you let people just fly and do their thing? Like, what's your attitude to the salespeople that just they just move on because they wanna, you know, they think they can do better? Well, we're in a very highly competitive market, so it's not only about doing something for themselves, but it's all the recruiting that's happening in bunch of different brokerages that are recruiting people. The grass is always greener on the other side. And, you know, at the end of the day, we do not, we're very different than a lot of the other brokerage firms where they hold contracts with their salespeople, where they have clawbacks, all kinds of different things in order to create, try to create retention. We actually let them fly, but we retain them through incredible hospitality, through incredible service, through an incredible culture. The people that work for our company really feel like some their best friends are company. They've built incredible relationships. And that's kind of what starts retaining it. We actually have a really high retention rate. So, really happy about that. It's worked out very well for us. But it takes a lot of work. That's not something that happens easily. It's a lot easier just to write a contract with callbacks and put money there and keep the client, you know, keep the agent through retention through money. But we do it differently. We do we retain through just incredible service throughout. K. I gotta keep asking about salespeople because you you know so much about this and it's just such a big issue. You know, I finding good people. Right? Like, I a quick story. Have a client of mine. Guy sells windows and doors outside of Philadelphia where I live. He he says he like, whenever he goes out to eat, whenever he's at a store, he's always like, guys, got his eyes open. You know? Like, he's like, listen. I can teach anybody in the world to sell windows and doors. I can't teach people to have a great attitude or have energy or show up on time or whatever. You know that that server at the restaurant that like remembers the whole order and is like super with you. Mean, that's that's how that guy recruits and he says it's like it's never failed them or rarely fails them. What what do you do to find good salespeople for your company? Where do you look? What do you do? Yeah, it's hard, know, like you said, it's a competitive business. So it's more about finding a most of the agents that come at our company are already established and you know, we already know them and we've already, you know, embedded them. We've done business with them. So it's kind of easy to know that, you know, when you're in your own micro market, the sales managers, the people, everybody, you know, they know the people. The hard one is when you're taking risks on the new guys, on rookies that are coming in. And that's where you really have to, you know, we look at personality tests, look at ethics, we look at what they've done in the past, where they went to school, what their sphere of influence is. It's critical in real estate, your sphere of influence, that you actually have access to people, because that's where you're going be able to make some sales, You have a good reputation, you know, that kind of stuff. But we look at a personality test. I mean, one typical personality test that I always just look at, and ask the question of, know, I say, hey, you're on your date, you're with a girl, you're, you know you've just finished a movie, you're heading to the restaurant, it's 09:55, the restaurant closes at ten, you walk up to the hostess stand and you say, hey can we get a table and she's like kitchen closes at ten, sorry what do you do? Right? I look for the salesperson that says, I got five minutes to order, sit me down, I'll get my order in. Right? Like, that's the guy I want, not the guy that says, oh, I'll get on my phone and see if I can figure out, you know, if there's another place that's open till eleven or whatever. Like, that's not the salesperson I want. I want the one that's Yeah. See this. I like that. That's a that that is a great question. I I you know, demographics. Like, you know, you you talk about hiring rookie salespeople. So for starters, I guess you do hire rookies. You do hire people that are, you know, inexperienced, but you you tend to get skew more towards experienced people, I guess. Right? Is that just is that We do. Just wondering if that's where the money is. I mean, that's the reality. You know, you've already got, like I said, you know, 5% of people doing 80% of the business. Yeah, they probably bring in a book of work, right? Yeah, but growing somebody, that's where you have great retention. Yeah. You know, helping somebody become one of those people. I mean, we've got plenty at the agency that have become one of those top 5%. Right. And they started as rookies. We have a lot of rookies that never made it past the first year. Yeah. You know, we have, you know, some people that, you know, do one deal a year and pop in every once in a while and you have a little bit of everything, right? But yeah, usually that one deal a year is big enough to keep up with the company. Okay, fair enough. I was recently talking on this podcast with a workplace guy who specializes generations. They do a lot of research. He does speaking on it. So there's something like five generations in the workplace. There's the Gen Zs and then there's the millennials. And there's some people break out the millennials between older and younger millennials because there's like a big skew, you know, between the two of them. You know, there's Gen Xers like me, there's, you know, boomers. So they're all like in one place, you know? And your kids, you have you have three daughters. Like what like what age range are they? Are they Gen Z? Have four daughters. Four. My my oldest works with me. She just came and picked up a key to go do a showing and to go crush it, it's amazing. She's 34 years old, think maybe. Then I have three other girls, Alexia, she's 28, she also works with me. And then I have Sofia who tried it for a year and didn't like it, she's now doing other stuff and then we have my youngest daughter who is a junior in high school so we're looking at colleges right now see I and got them all man. You got them all. I know all the generations and all of that stuff. So so okay. So first question I have on that is, you know, not uncommon. You're running a business. You're bringing in your kids into the business. I have clients that do that all the time. What have you learned by doing that? What advice would you have for people that want to bring their kids into the business because it's a different dynamic. Yeah, don't give them a silver spoon. Don't make it easy for them, you know, let them work. Let them learn train them, You know, to me, it's what they have is access to an opportunity. It's not about feeding them and making it easy because also, if you do that, you create a culture in your business that is, you know, nepotistic, that's not good. And then the others start looking and sometimes, you know, your kids actually end up having it harder because, you know, you want to protect that culture, you want to make sure that all the other salespeople are not saying, hey, this kid's successful because they're, you know, they're the boss's son, the boss's daughter. And so, you know, people, we as parents end up going the other way. I don't think you need to do that either. Think you need to find the right balance. Life's all about balance. Find that right balance that allows you to make the right judgment call that makes them driven, that makes them so that they're working for their business, but you know, don't make life impossible for them. They're lucky to have your daughter or your son And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's, you know, sales is all about who you know. Yeah. And so if you happen to know the boss, you know the boss. Like, it's that simple. Yeah. I agree. And also, you know, when you're trying to hire people, I mean, it's it's such a crapshoot to bring people in from Indeed or somebody that you just don't know. Here, obviously, you know your kids. So theoretically, they're coming in with your full knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses. And hopefully, you're smart enough to be able to handle that. You mentioned one of your daughters like it didn't work out, which again is completely common. A lot of my clients. So what do you do? What kind of expectations do set for your kids? I mean, are you you man enough to step up and say, like, this isn't working out? We have to split ways, but we're still gonna have a good relationship. In my situation, she was the one that didn't want to keep going. Didn't work out for She didn't like it, so that was my situation, and she was mad enough to step up and say, I don't love this. I've never tried to get my kids to work for the agency. I've never told them that that's where they should be at. I've actually probably pushed them to think about other options and other avenues and always told them that the door was open at the agency. But that was not anything that I ever said, you know, you should do or that I expected, and I want them to be happy, want them to find the right path in life, and at the end of day, we all work so hard, we spend most of our time working, a third of our time hopefully sleeping, if you're getting your eight hours a day, a third of your life at work, and then the other third of your time is split between a gazillion things, your boyfriend, your husband, your wife, your working out time, your solo time, your all of it, Your friends, and so the most, and most of us usually work more than eight hours a day, so most of our time is spent at work, and I just want them to find the right path and be happy. Okay. That's great. Couple of questions on the on on the employee side, salespeople side, and I I do wanna pivot a little bit, but I I mentioned earlier about the different generations. So talk to me about that as well. Like how what are your thoughts on you've got people that are working for you that are probably in fifties and sixties, right? And people that are in their mid twenties. How do you you handle that? How do you approach those different demographics? Is it a different approach or the same? It's kind of easy for me. You know, it's really not a different approach. I think it's a very similar approach. I mean, keep in mind that we're just trying to motivate, you know, in mindset, the agents and salespeople. And everybody has a little bit of a different motivation, a little bit of a different mindset, but at the end of the day, we all need to do the same thing, right? Whatever that same thing is for you, whatever gets you motivated, whatever gets you to make that call, to not have fear. One of the great characteristic traits of a salesperson, when I was talking about self confidence, is not having fear of rejection. You don't pick up the phone to call, most people can't. So when you have youth, generally speaking, that's their biggest issue, is that fear of rejection, and a lot of the youth doesn't call, they text, and so much can be lost in translation of the text. So, you know, we try to teach them to pick up the phone and call, I mean, look, I'll see you in ten minutes, you can text that, right? I'm running five minutes late, no problem, right? But when you want to negotiate, you want to have a conversation, that's not done by text, that's done by a phone call. If it was done by text, we'd have, we would all lose our jobs because the AI robots will start winning. So it can't, it cannot be done. And so, you know, we need to get them past the rejection, fear of rejection. The older people, I think it's getting them, the biggest challenge is getting them to learn new things, to keep up with the youth. As an example, just said AI, use AI to be better. Don't be afraid of the computer. Don't be afraid of new tools. It's not the same old way anymore. There's no way you're going to be able to compete with some of these youths if you're not embracing some of the technology that's out there, and you want to keep doing it the way that you used to do it. You just won't survive. You just won't not be able to compete. Tell me a little bit more about the technology as well. I mean, obviously it's a very, very much of a changing landscape, that, you know, I was gonna ask you like, what's changed the most in your business in the, you know, twenty plus years that you've been doing this, almost thirty years now. And and, you know, you talk about some old school things, which is a 100% true. You know, like I close more deals when I'm face to face with people. It's just a fact. There is you can't not change that human element. And for God's sake, in the kind of business that you're in, I mean, that just goes even 100 times. But technology is changing the way the way your business is run. Kind of curious, like what you're using now and you're thinking, I'm sure about the future, like, where do you think you're gonna be leading more into? What kind of technology do you think is gonna have a big impact on your company over the last I five think there's a lot of changes happening. My particular industry is going through changes now. It was kinda late adopting technology. We went through the whole PropTech world not too long ago, there's been some successes, some failures, but we were late in adopting technology, so there's still a lot of changes. There's going to be a lot of changes in the MLS, right now there's a bunch of stuff happening, you know, with private listings and all of that stuff. Tremendous changes. As everybody is pretty aware, there was a huge lawsuit against SAR regarding commissions and antitrust. So our industry is really being looked at by the government right now. And I think that the biggest changes that are going to be happening in my industry are going to be happening now. Not necessarily happened over the last twenty years, but we're in the middle of them right now. What do you use yourself out of curiosity? Do you have like a CRM system that you rely on or are you just pencil and paper? How do you keep yourself productive? How do you when you get up tomorrow morning, you're gonna follow-up some things to do. You've got your calendar, you've got your, you know, whatever. How do you keep all that organized? We have an incredible CRM system that keeps everything going and keeps everything organized. I happen to use, I'm a very visual guy. So I happen to use a program called Asana, tiles you and everything, so I hit, you know, my screen is huge, okay, and I have it open and I've got 36 tiles open and rows going down. Is that your pipeline that you manage on the My pipeline to do's, listing, marketing, calls, projects, have an hour and a half every single day of what I call MU time, me time, Mauricio Jumansky, and that is set up to work on future projects thinking entrepreneurial like what do I want to do to improve like that's an hour and a half of my day every single Well, final question. You've been great. Insights. Looking ahead, we're we're having this conversation right now. It's the very beginning of May twenty twenty five, looking ahead, the real estate industry. And again, it's it's I can't generalize because the luxury market is such a different animal from like the rest of real estate. But even so, you're you're a follower and you're, you know, you're you're very well versed in the industry itself. Talk to me a little bit about the industry itself in California, which is where you are. How is it now? And and also, you know, how do you expect it to be? What are you looking forward to? Is this is this a good time to get in the real estate? California, Florida, New York, Portugal, Spain, it's a global thing. They're all the same right now. Do know we have 140 offices around the world, so not only am I in California, but I'm everywhere. I would say there's very few spots that are different than California, but real estate industry has been in a housing recession for coming up on three in one month, it'll be three years. In July, it'll be three years. And we've been in a housing recession due to high interest rates, due to low inventory, low inventory because of high interest rates, nobody wants to sell, nobody's bringing everything on the market, everybody's holding on to their old stuff, and it's just been really difficult. Funny enough, usually when you're in a recession this long and when you look at 2007, when you look at the early 90s, any of these recessions, most of the time what ends up happening is the inventory starts growing because people are hurting and prices start dropping because people are hurting. And as that happens, new buyers get into the market. We're in situations where that's not happening. We've been in a three year recession, yet there's still low inventory. It's starting to finally grow, by the way. And there is still high interest rates. And pricing didn't really drop until very recently, I would say the last quarter we finally started to see some price drops. And so I predict, you know, a year from now, year and a half from now, we're finally going to come out of this housing recession. I think it's a great time, you want to get into real estate because you need to build your platform in order to grow. You have a year to build it and you're gonna and I think we're, you know, within a year, we're going to be in a boom in real estate. There's been too many people sitting on the sidelines, not enough sales. Eventually, everybody needs to make a move. There's a huge pent up demand, don't you agree? And, know, what you need is you need a slippage in mortgage rates. I know a lot of people say that, gee, know, if I'm sitting on a 3% mortgage or whatever from back in the day, you know, mortgage rates really have to come down a lot before I'm gonna make a move. But I don't know about that. People get restless. People wanna sell. I mean, you look at your daughters. People wanna get into like the market. They wanna get their first term. They wanna whatever. By the way, also becomes the new norm. Okay? They just It's have to get used to a mentality issue. It's like, okay, I've been paying, people don't even remember it's 3% anymore. Can tell you that conversation is finally starting to go away. For the last two and a half years that conversation did not go away, but that's finally starting to go away. But think about this, affordability is not only about your 3% interest rate, it has to do with your interest rate plus the amount of money you're paying for the house. So if the price drops on the house by 15%, you know, that's not a huge drop, the big drops have been 30%. In every big recession, it's been 30%, 35%, Okay? But even if the housing prices dropped by 15% and mortgage rates dropped by 15%, 20%, everything becomes way more affordable. Puts up demand and the whole thing, all of a sudden you sparked the whole business going again. You know, it's funny because household wealth is still at historical highs, you know, despite the fluctuations in the market and who knows tariffs might point, you know, push up prices where people are just not buying as much and saving a little bit more and that's more money that could go to their homes as well. I just I think you guys are very you're very well positioned. You've built a great company. You've got the infrastructure there. You've got your team there. And I don't know, man. I think, like, in the next year or two, I mean, your rates come down a little bit, and you could be really sitting on some really some really booming times. I and I hope you are. I really are. Thank you so much for that. I appreciate it. Mauricio, thank you for joining me. It was a great conversation. I learned a lot. I appreciate it. I had, you know, a bunch more questions to ask you, but we're just out of time. So but I do appreciate you spending the time with us. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Do you have a topic or a guest that you would like to hear on Thrive? Please let us know. Visit payx.methrivetopics and send us your ideas or matters of interest. Also, if your business is looking to simplify your HR, payroll, benefits, or insurance services, see how Paychex can help. Visit the resource hub at paychecks.com/works. That's W O R X. Paychex can help manage those complexities while you focus on all the ways you want your business to thrive. I'm your host, Gene Marks, and thanks for joining us. Till next time. Take care. This podcast is property of Paychex Incorporated 2025. All rights reserved.