 What's up, everybody? Ricky Krooth here. Welcome back to my channel. So today I want to get into why I don't use a CRM in my business. I personally do not have a CRM in my business. Now, I know a lot of you are thinking, why in the world don't you have a CRM in your business? That is complete insanity. What is going on here? But the fact is that it's absolutely true. I don't have a CRM and I never have had a CRM. So how do I keep up with all my business? How do I do so many deals? And how do I manage all of these clients without a CRM? Well, the truth is when I got into the business, CRMs, at least the way they are in today's world, were not even around at the time that I got into the business. So everything was pretty much done through email. I kind of kept the database within my email, my Yahoo server. That's kind of where I kept my database when I first started. Of course, I was 20 years old when I first started. I became a millionaire by 23, lost it all by 25, went bankrupt, and then had to come back into the business. When I came back in the business in 2008, I somewhat kept the database in the same kind of system within my email server for a little while. But after about a year, I just kind of stopped using it. The reason that I was using the email server as the place where I kept my contacts was because that's where I was sending my weekly email from at the time. I was sending it directly from Yahoo. Yahoo lets you send out 100 emails per email, okay, so 100 recipients per email five times an hour. So I was having to send out five emails per hour with 100 people per email each hour. So there was a time where I was literally running five emails an hour, 24 hours a day. I had it on a timer, because I was sending out so many emails. So eventually had to switch over and that's when I jumped on to constant contacts. When I jumped over to constant contacts, that was like a dream come true. I was thinking, you mean I could put all my contacts into one database, create an email and hit send and it goes to everybody? Wow, that was like a mind blowing experience for me. Same thing when I came across Red X. Same kind of mind blowing experience there because I was looking everybody up by hand, looking every number up by hand, typing them in white pages or Google or what have you, looking for their phone numbers and then dialing them by finger. I was dialing numbers by finger and so it was really difficult to make 100 calls a day, especially with all the other stuff going on with real estate. So it was taking me a good, it was taking me 15 hours, let's say to look up 100 numbers and to dial all of them by hand, 15 hours. Now in today's world with Red X, I literally click a few buttons to get all the numbers I need, hit the dialer and I'm calling about 100 every hour and a half or so. I mean, I'm doing things in terms of emails and phone calls 10 times faster than I was maybe 10 years ago. So when you've been through the types of markets and the types of activities that I've had to do to build my business and then you fast forward to today's world and to where I've actually taken advantage of these technologies for the way I used to do it, it gives me an entirely different appreciation for the technology that we have at our fingertips in today's world. Now as far as the CRM goes, everybody's in my constant contacts database. Now I don't really have any contact information there. It's just their email addresses. I don't really have their name, phone number, any of that stuff. It's just their email address and I just send the weekly email to everybody's email address that's in that database. Another place that I keep data is in my phone. When somebody calls me, I program them in my phone, boom, they're right there in my phone which is also linked to my Google account. So I kind of have my contacts backed up that way and within their contact information I'll put what property they own or what they're looking to buy and so I kind of have all that in my phone where if they call me, it'll pop up on caller ID, I'll remember who they are, I'll answer and then boom, I'll have the conversation. But as far as a CRM goes, where you put all of your contacts in this one central location, you can kind of keep up with everything going on there. It gives you reminders to call in the back or to do this or to do that, anniversary's birthday, so on and so forth. I absolutely do not have that. A couple of reasons why I don't have a CRM. One is because I'm so busy closing deals, I don't really have time to deal with trying to organize my databases. So I don't have time for a CRM because I'm too busy helping people buy and sell properties and I tell this to a lot of agents because a lot of agents are saying, what's CRM, what's CRM, what's CRM? And they're spending all this time researching, trying to figure out what the best CRM for them to use is and I'll tell them it's okay to have a CRM and I'm fine with you guys having a CRM. I want you to have a CRM, that's great, do it. But I think that agents take it a little too far with overthinking what their CRM's gonna be and then once they pick the CRM out, I think they spend way too much time trying to organize their CRM. I think while those agents are sitting there organizing their CRM, I'm sitting over here talking to people, closing deals. Another reason I don't have a CRM on top of the fact that I just don't have time to deal with a CRM is the fact that I believe in the bottom of my heart that business is completely unlimited. There's always an unlimited resource of new business, of old business, past clients, referrals, new business prospects, cold calling, whatever it is, it's unlimited, you cannot do it all. So it comes back to how much can you handle? You know, your success to me is predicated on how much business you can personally handle at one time. What's your mental capacity? How many deals can you juggle at once? And I think that the way that I approach the business is that I'm just churning the pot. I'm churning, churning, churning, talking to as many people as I can, building brand with as many people as I can, right? I'm going after volume, okay? So I'm churning this huge pot of volume, okay? And then what happens is people come to me from me churning the pot or, you know, they respond to an email or I'm calling them or they're calling me or they're sending me referrals because I have such a volume of churning going on in terms of marketing and branding and phone calling and emailing, okay? All that stuff adds up to people coming to me and it puts me in a situation where I'm just handling as much as I can possibly handle. So how do I keep up with it all? I keep up with it all on a notebook. I write it all down. Any hot leads that I have going on right now, anything negotiating, all my appointments, I have it in a book, okay? So I have a scheduler that tells me where I need to be and when I need to be there, appointments that I'm gonna, you know, that I need to think about that are months ahead of time. I'll skip a forward in my scheduler, put it there. And then I have a legal pad that sits in whatever day, whatever week that I'm in the middle of and on that legal pad are going to be the contacts, the priorities, the hot leads, the sellers, the buyers listings I'm working on, buyers that are thinking about doing things and have a list of all that that I keep at all times in front of me that I'm always working on. I'm always looking at the list and what's next? Who don't need to hit up next? Who would I need to follow up with? What appointment do I need to go to next? Have I not talked to this person in a week? Okay, boom, I'm gonna call them. So everything is right there in my notebook. If I think I need to follow up with somebody in a month, I'll put that on my scheduler, I'll flip a month ahead and put that there, right? But if it's somebody that I'm constantly trying to work with, they're gonna be considered a hot lead and they're gonna be on my legal pad. So that's kind of how I manage it as far as making people feel like they're number one to me, the way that that happens is when somebody contacts me or somebody does a deal with me or has a listing with me, then they are top priority. I'm gonna put them ahead of everything and make sure that whatever they have going on at the time is going smooth, it's going the way it's supposed to and I'm just gonna be right there the whole time managing those little situations and letting them know along the way this is going good, that's going good, oh, we got a little road bump here, don't worry about it, I'll take care of it and I'm gonna make sure that they feel comfortable with the entire deal, that way at the end of the deal, they say, man, that sure was easy. Well, they don't really know what I had to go through to make it happen. So I feel like that's my job, make them feel it went smooth and have a really good experience of the transaction or the listing or whatever it was, even if we're just showing property, I want them to feel like they had a really great experience. I'm always giving out gift cards, gift cards, gift cards, gift cards, I'm always giving out gift cards everywhere I go, every buyer I meet, every seller I meet, I'm always giving out gift cards. I try to be as personal as I can, I like to listen to people, right? I think that's the main thing that us agents are missing is we're not listening to people, we're just trying to go for the appointment, go for the appointment, go for the appointment and I want us to more so listen, ask questions and listen and see what's going on instead of trying to take the conversation where we want it to go, let's have the conversation on their terms and when we do that they're gonna feel comfortable with us and they're gonna say, I think this is a person that I can do business with. So it's kind of a thing of it's not broke, so don't fix it. I never have had a CRM, I don't plan on getting a CRM, that could change tomorrow. I'm always changing up what I'm doing, I'm always trying new things, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work and taking it from there. So I'm not saying I'll never have a CRM, I'm just saying that I haven't had one up to this point. And basically the bottom line is, is that I just want to give you a different perspective because I think too many of you put so much into, what's my CRM gonna be? And I think that that's not even really what you should be so focused on. Sure, if that's what you want, you want a CRM, I think you should have one, just pick one and go, quit overthinking it. I don't have one, I'm selling 100 properties a year as a single agent. That should tell you something, not that you shouldn't have a CRM, but just that maybe you shouldn't put as much thought into it as you think you should. I hope this video gave you some value and gave you a different look. I'm just sharing what works for me, I'm just sharing my thoughts and what I do. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I just want to give you a different perspective. Please hit that like button and shoot me a comment so that the YouTube algorithm can push my videos out to more real estate agents and can help me on my mission to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry. Please let me know if there's anything in the world I can do for you, I'm still answering every single DM on Instagram. And let me know if there's a particular video you want me to make. You guys have a good rest of the day, go crush it, I'll see you on the next video. Let's go. Let's go.