How Ricky Carruth Built a Personal Brand That Grew Beyond Real Estate

Host 00:00

I closed a thousand properties as a solo agent. It's not easy to do. What do you think it is that has allowed you to scale that trust? A lot of his organic stuff isn't buy my stuff. It's just value. I think you have 200, 250,000 followers on Instagram as an example. Like it's not easy to get there.

Host1 00:19

I think the best sales people I've ever met my entire life are the greatest listeners I've ever known.

Host 00:23

All the truths are out there, but you can re-articulate a truth in a way nobody's ever heard before.

Host1 00:28

What's up, everybody? Grant Wise here. Welcome back to the Partner Profit Podcast, the show where we teach you how to turn your relationships into revenue. And I could not think of anybody else on the planet I would rather be talking to today than Mr. Ricky Carruth. What up, Ricky? Thanks for being with me today.

Host 00:43

My pleasure, bro. Good to see you, man.

Host1 00:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so good to see you. I'm glad we got to catch up for a few before we uh jumped on here and started chatting. For the people that are listening to this and maybe don't know much about you, give us a bit of the backstory. How'd you get to where you are today?

Host 00:54

Oh, yeah, for sure. I uh I started out roofing houses with my dad back in the early 90s as a teenager. And uh went to four different colleges in two years. I found a history class, University of Alabama, and I said, college is not for me. And uh I got my real estate license at Shelton State, and uh that was in 2002. I started selling real estate down here on the Alabama Gulf Coast. A lot of people don't realize Alabama has the most, some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. And um, I did that for 20 years. I made a million bucks really quickly, lost it all in the crash. I was homeless, sleeping in a car somebody gave me in 2006 and 2007. And I worked on an oil rig for a year, roofed some more houses, and then I got back in real estate in 2008 and uh I took everything I learned through that experience and just crushed it. And I built my business the correct way the second time around. And that catapulted me to become the number one agent in my entire market out of all teams and brokerages, et cetera, et cetera. That was for eight years straight. I sold a hundred properties from 2014 to 2021, and I was also the number one Remax agent in the entire state of Alabama for three different years, 14, 18, and 19. And so I retired from sales in 22 because in 17, the first year I made a million bucks as an agent. I thought, wow, there's a lot of agents, there's a lot of struggling agents out there like I used to be. And I thought, you know, I kind of felt like my calling wasn't to help people buy and sell real estate like I thought. I realized it was to help these struggling agents, kind of sized up a lot of the mistakes I made that eventually led to me falling on my face. And I was like, man, I can help a lot of people. So because I did, I did kind of build the business a very contrarian to a lot of the mainstream ideas around building your business as a real estate agent. So I thought I had something different to bring to the table when it comes to the conversation of success as an agent. And I wrote two books and those kind of took off. I started speaking, writing, coaching, creating content. And that was 10 years ago, the end of 16. I did my first talk and finished the book and started this journey of social media content. What I did was is I took the skills that I developed as an agent building my local brand through email marketing and phone calls and postcards, and I applied those same principles to social media, which I didn't use to build my real estate business at all. I applied those same principles to social media to build this national global brand. It's just been incredible. I mean, to build a personal brand in today's world, you know, is it's not a must, you know, like there are plenty of business models that don't require it. But for those who do build a, you know, an incredible personal brand, like I've been fortunate enough to do, it does create an incredible moat around not only your business, but it just creates so many opportunities. I man, I can't even tell you the amount of like opportunities and like businesses that I'm part of and you know, just all kinds of different things that you would never think of that it's been a direct result of just putting in work to learn how to create great organic content, which is the name of the game, really, because even if you run ads, you know, ads have algorithms as well. And so you really need to have a have a great organic game to really have the most success running ads. So I haven't gotten into the ad game yet because I haven't had to, but we were just talking about it before. I haven't even pulled that lever in my business, which is coaching real estate agents. But that day's coming real soon now that I'm kind of building the infrastructure out. But yeah, I just threw all that, I realized I was put on this earth to help real estate agents build, you know, incredible businesses and live a great life. And I had no idea that me being an agent wasn't necessarily like my story. It was just part, it was a chapter of my story to build credibility that I can do this and I can teach you how to do this. I didn't realize at the time, but the whole thing was just a setup to get where I am now. And dude, it is amazing. I mean, it's it's euphoric, it's pure bliss to be where I'm sitting right now, knowing everything I've been through.

Host1 04:56

Yeah, that's awesome, man. I've always loved your story because I've had a little bit of a similar story. I was in the roofing industry, also failed out of history in college. Like we've got uh some some similar components there, but I would agree an incredible personal brand uh in the real estate industry as long as I've known you. And building a brand is really building a relationship with a group of people, right? With an audience that's paying attention to you and connected to you and and listening to you. You've done it in in real estate business, and now you've done it uh in the on the coaching side of the business. There's obviously got to be some type of a framework, I would imagine, in your mind for like, okay, when we get started doing this, we got to do this, we gotta do this, we gotta do this. Kind of walk us through what is that framework for you for building a brand, building a relationship with an audience?

Host 05:36

I think so. I think you have to just realize that, you know, your content is an extension of who you are as a person. So first it starts with you, you know. Do you when you tell yourself you're gonna do something, do you do it? When you say I'm gonna get up and work out in the morning, do you do it every time? Do you say, you know, I'm gonna eat right this week and you eat right this week? Do you, you know, I'm gonna make calls that today and you actually do it, or do you back out on those promises you made yourself? Because that's where it starts. Because social media is just gonna expose all that. It's just gonna amplify who you are as a person. And if you're not dependable to yourself, then that's gonna show up in social media, right? For example, like, you know, if you're not dependable, then people are gonna see that because you're not posting consistently. It shows up in so many different ways. So I think first, like you got to become the person who you trust. You got to become the person who's dependable to yourself before you can be dependable to other people. I think that's kind of step one. Otherwise, it's you you're just gonna amplify who you are. Secondly, through you becoming that person, they've got to see that through your content, you know. So going back to the example I made, they need to see consistent content from you so that they realize, wow, this person is consistent, they're hardworking, they're dependable. And see, social media and email, email's a social media platform, you know, all these different platforms, the consistency of content there from you proves to them over time that you're consistent, dependable, hardworking. And people love hard workers. So immediately you've got some traction there when it comes to building a relationship, building trust in the marketplace. Then to take it a step further in the content, you need to prove to them that you can solve their problems, whatever their problem may be, whatever they're facing. And that could be from a macro perspective, from a micro perspective, from like an evergreen perspective, uh, you know, it could be specific, you know, market trendy things, who knows what it is. But you have to become an expert at whatever your audience's problems are in real time and have real solutions that ding, ding, ding, they've never heard before. And that's the part that a lot of people skip is they'll just kind of regurgitate things they've heard elsewhere, and your audience, you know, hears it from you for the fifth time, and that devalues your, you know, your so-called wisdom that for them, right? They want to feel like you can teach them something new, right? So I always say viral content is content that someone that that people have neither heard nor seen before, right? That that's like the basis of viral content. It's something that nobody's ever heard or seen before. That's why you see like, you know, those animal virals go video because nobody's ever seen that before, so it goes viral, you know. But once once, you know, when it floods them, when you flood the market with a bunch of those videos, then they start to lose their traction, right? Well, that's how you have to be around ideas, right? You have to have ideas that nobody's ever heard before. It's like there's really kind of two spectrums of content right now. There's the really low effort content, the really high produced content, and both win really big, but that's about 5% low effort, 5%, you know, really high produced and thought through and a lot of money and time spent on that piece of content. Then in the middle, there's this 90% of content that's just okay. It's good, but it's just okay, that doesn't get really any views, right? And so for me, I'm a very low effort content creator. You know, I just pop up with my phone and just say things people haven't thought about. That's why my content does so well because I'm not focused on the production side as much as I am the ideology behind what I'm saying. And that is it triggering people to think in a positive way about the future and about, you know, the potential of them, you know, succeeding at a higher level, living a better life, whatever, whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish and whatever the problems are preventing them from doing that. Right. So to sum it all up, I think it starts with you. Like, are who are you? Like for for real estate agents always ask, like, would you hire yourself, right? Knowing everything you know about you, right? Knowing every time you didn't show up when you were supposed to show up, or every time you didn't do something you said you were gonna do, like you know, you know deep down how dependable and consistent you are behind closed doors. Would you hire yourself, right? I think you need to become the agent that you would hire, no, no doubt 100%. You know, that's kind of step one. Step two is consistency of content to show that you are a consistent, dependable, hardworking person. If you don't have that base, right? If you don't have that as the foundation after becoming the person, then they're looking at other people who are consistent, right? There's a lot of competition out there. And then third, the third layer is are you saying things that they've never heard before that make them say, hmm, when people watch your content, the the response you want from your audience is, hmm, wow. That's crazy. I never thought about it like that. That's the response you want from people, and you're not gonna get that response by just regurgitating things AI told you or regurgitate regurgitating things that you've heard or that another influencer said, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So I think that's a good three-layer, you know, foundation for kind of you know becoming a content creator and building trust and deeper relationships in the market.

Host1 10:45

As an extension of that, you're saying that you know, when you're creating content, you want to say things in a different way or you know, from a different perspective, or things that people have never heard before. Yeah, it can that be difficult, especially in an industry like real estate, where there's really two to three million people that are talking about the same thing, right? Not not obviously on a on a given day, but there's a lot of people that are you know have been in the industry for a long time or have been doing business the same way. I'm curious your perspective there. How do you come at things from a different angle that maybe people haven't heard before when there's a lot of people in an industry maybe talking about the same thing?

Host 11:18

Well, I mean, that makes it easy if everybody's talking about the same thing. I talk about something different. And I can even talk about the same subject, but say it differently, right? You're not gonna recreate a truth.

Host1 11:26

Is that saying it differently just from your perspective or from your experience or both?

Host 11:30

Well, your perspective comes from your experience, so yeah, really both. You know, like that, and that's one thing is like that's a that's a big part of it, is like having experience. And like there are people who don't have experience who can ideate incredible things. There's no doubt about it. There are some really smart, you know, gift of gab kind of people out there that can really just like, but those are like a top 1% of 1%. You know, the average person, me or yourself, or 99.99% of people watching this, you know, you don't have that ability. And so you have to base it on experience, which means you have to go do something, have the experience to be able to bring that perspective to the content. I mean, I I closed a thousand properties as a solo agent, you know, I was a top agent forever in my market. You know, I did it for 20 years. I was 15 years in before I made my first piece of content in terms of like a video or like a social media post about real estate. I was 15 years as an agent before I even made my first video. So yeah, it's it definitely comes from experience, but it's having enough experience to have an opinion, right? And to understand the game to the level of whatever whatever niche you're in, to understand the game of that niche to the level where you understand not only your opinion, but everyone's else's and why and what the difference is. What that does is it creates such a level of you you have such conviction around you know what what you're saying. You have so much confidence, right? And people can people can feel that coming through the video about how strongly you feel, especially in today's world, like people can smell right through you if this is coming from a place of you know insecurity or you know, like you're just trying to to act like you know something when you really don't, and you really don't have the experience to kind of back up a lot of the stuff that you're saying. People will see right through it and eat, eat that up, you know, they'll eat you, eat you up and spit you out. But you're absolutely right. You know, you gotta have that perspective, you gotta have that opinion. And again, you're not gonna recreate a truth. Like all the truths are out there, but you can re-articulate a truth in a way nobody's ever heard before. See, that that's the secret, is like, okay, everybody's saying the same thing, but how can I say the same thing, just say it differently in a way that actually makes people think, you know, instead of people saying, Well, I've heard that 15 times, and then they hear me say it, and they're like, Whoa, I hadn't heard it like that before. And and you know what this takes? It takes brain sweat. You have to make your brain sweat longer than a second and actually sit down. Matter of fact, I was doing it right before we came on. I'm literally ideating content. Uh, I've been doing it for like the last hour before we came on, and I was only like three different short form scripts in, you know, in an hour where I wasn't even done with the third one. I was still kind of mapping it out about exactly and like I'm talking about getting down to where I'm tweaking like one word here, one word there that makes a big, big difference in how this is going to hit people, you know. But again, I've been going viral on social for a long, long time. And I've put out, I mean, my Instagram has like almost 6,000 posts. I have a lot of experience with creating, you know, in different formats.

Host1 14:47

I remember when I first saw you do this. Does the does the intro hook where you're uh I don't even know how to describe what you're doing, but you're it's almost like you're kind of like, I wouldn't say yelling at the camera, but that what's that thing that you do? It's like woo-woo thing where you oh the ooh part.

Host 15:02

So the ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the ooh with the green screen. So that was strategic. So I was doing those green screens, and in the beginning, I would watch those videos back and I would realize, okay, if and I look at it from the audience's standpoint, right? From the viewer's standpoint, I looked at those videos and it was like, okay, the visual hook is the article's headline, right at the top, because I've green green screen, screenshot an article, put it in the background, and so you see the title of the article in the background. And so that's the visual hook. People read that and they're like, oh, what's he gonna say? And in the beginning, I was kind of just went right into my opinions about that. And when I would watch those back, I could picture my viewers' brain trying to read the headline and listen to my opinions at the same time. And I was like, this is not as digestible. I need to do something in the beginning that gives them time to read the title to understand what I'm fixing to give context on before I start giving context on it. And that's when I kind of came up with the ooh part. And that's so it was it was strategically designed to do something that's kind of funny that gives the audience time to understand what I'm about to get into. People think it was just something stupid, but it wasn't. It was like, what can I do in the beginning of this video to make this video more digestible? And honestly, when I started doing it, those videos started going viral. I mean, I've had millions and millions and millions and millions of views on those green screen article videos.

Host1 16:26

That's funny. I remember the first time I saw I was just sitting there dying, laughing. And I listened to the rest of the video, and uh it was certainly memorable. Uh I would imagine well, because you you keep doing it. One of the things that I've watched you do unbelievably effectively, and I think you did it a lot when you were doing business one-to-one, because in your real estate business, you were you know kind of known, I think, for picking up the phone and calling people and building relationships. Cold. But what I've also seen you do socially that's been really interesting is uh I would describe that as like you have scaled trust. It is not easy to hit I think you have 200, 250,000 followers on Instagram as an example. Like it's not easy to get there creating the type of content that you create. It's not necessarily like some people do entertainment and those types of things. Like you're just giving people value in an industry that's actually kind of old, right? Like there's not there's not that many you have 10%. What is that? Would that be right? You would have roughly I think it's like 10, 15, 20 percent of the real estate audience like followers, and I'm sure it's more than that. What do you think has allowed you to scale trust that way so effectively to a point where you have that many people that are paying attention to what you say and that are taking action on what you say? And obviously, I've seen you have amazing affiliate relationships and building an amazing coaching company. It's not easy to do. What do you think it is that has allowed you to scale that trust?

Host 17:40

I think it goes back to the three layers I came up with. You know, it starts with me, and then it's consistency of content. There there was a period of time where I was I was posting six reels a day, and I did that for a long time. I did that for like a year and a half back in like 20 like 18 and 19 or something like that. I forget, I forget when that was, but there was like a year and a half where I did six reels a day. And then, you know, like I realized like the inst the algorithm wasn't really favoring that necessarily, you know. But honestly, like we've we're kind of back there. Like you should be posting like five or six times a day, honestly. Like you should post as much as you possibly can uh right now. It's insane what what the reach you can get with just posting more is quite phenomenal. I think the consistency and then me proving to them that I can solve their problems, right? And and and also I'm not big on a bunch of right hooks, meaning I don't I'm not like, yeah, like there's not a lot of CTAs for like buy my stuff, you know. When you watch some of the bigger guys, there's not hardly any CTAs, you know. When you watch a Gary B, when you watch even a Grant Cardone, as salsy as he is, a lot of his organic stuff isn't buy my stuff, you know, it's just value. I've just kind of modeled after a lot of those guys that I see that are big and they don't they don't try to push push a lot to get people to join their thing or buy their stuff, and so I think that uh plays a lot into it as well.

Host1 19:09

100%. I love it, man. I know we're running out of time. I've just got a couple last questions here, and this is one of my favorite questions to ask. You've done a lot to build some incredible relationships, you know, both one-to-one and one-to-many. How do you take those relationships and how do you actually turn them into revenue?

Host 19:22

Take the framework, become the person, do the work consistently, and then solve their problems. And I think like the way that you monetize an audience is by selling them what they want. And the problem that a lot of people run into that try to create businesses around, you know, social media and audiences stuff is they want to try to sell the audience what they want to sell them versus what the audience wants to buy. Like that's the biggest unlock, is it's your job as a business owner, you know, on social with an audience to identify what it is your audience wants to buy. And then it's real easy to sell it to them because they already want to buy it. I think that's the problem most people run into. They'll create a course or they'll create an agency or they'll create something, a mastermind or whatever, and it doesn't really hit, you know. And the business owner's like, well, what, you know, what's the deal here? You know, whatever. It's like you didn't really like try to figure out through strategically asking your audience, you know, what it is you would like to buy. You know, it's like when you when I served tables for a while, and by the way, you said you roofed houses. I think everyone should have to roof houses for at least like a year of their life, right? I also think anybody that's gonna be, that's for sure. Yeah. And and I think anybody that's in sales or becomes a real estate agent should be a waiter, should be a server at a restaurant as well. Because man, you you so learn people's skills and you learn how to serve people. But you don't walk up to the table as a server and say, hey, how you guys doing? You're gonna have a coke, you're gonna have the hamburger, you're gonna have, you know, water, and that's what you guys are having. So see you later. It's not how it happens. You walk up and you say, What would you like? Right. And then you go get them whatever they want, you bring it back to them, and then they pay for it, right? And when you build your business, it should be the same way. What is it that you would like? Okay, cool. You go build whatever it is that they want, you bring it back and you hand it to them and they pay for it. You know, and it takes this whole trying to convince people to do things completely off the table, right? And by the way, when you find yourself trying to convince people to do business with you, you've already lost the game. It's over right then, right? Convincing is what really bad salespeople resort to once they see that they've lost this battle of trying to get this person to do something. And by the way, that's why they're in that problem in the first place, the situation in the first place, because they try to get this person to do something. Your job in sales is not trying to get somebody to do anything, it's just to help them do what they already want to do for their reasons. Right? So, yeah, I think that's the biggest thing, man, to learn how to like monetize your audience. What do you want? Like, I'll go get you whatever you want, just tell me, and I'll make it happen, right? And then you go create a product.

Host1 22:05

Yeah, put yourself in a position to serve, not sell. I think the best sales people I've ever met in my entire life are the greatest listeners I've ever known. Um they're really good at asking questions and sitting back and listening. And if you can do that, nobody ever feels like you're quote unquote selling them. I think we're all selling to everybody every day. It's just some of us are uh a little better at it, I think, than others. It's asking questions and listening and asking follow-up questions and getting clarity. And to what you to what you said, I love the uh metaphor of being a servant a restaurant. It's totally it's a hundred percent what it is. You're just asking them what they want, you're going back and making it for them or bringing it to them, and then they'll pay for it. And so, man, I I'd love this conversation. I appreciate you appreciate you so much spending some time with me walking through this. I always like to ask everybody, how can the listeners of the podcast partner with you? What's important to you right now, and how can we help you?

Host 22:51

So I guess the best thing for me is I read the Bible every day, and every Sunday I sit down after I read the Bible and I think, okay, what's the message that agents need to hear right now in the industry? And I email that out every Sunday. So I'll give you a link and you can put that link in the description there for people to sign up to get those Sunday agent devotionals, I call it, and also do market updates and strategically strategical things uh for agents throughout the week. And uh also follow me on Instagram and YouTube, just at Ricky Caruth. Yeah, and and glad to connect with anybody.

Host1 23:21

I love it, man. I'll make sure that we link that up in the show notes. Appreciate you a ton. This has been awesome.

Host 23:26

Thank you, bro.

Host1 23:27

Yeah, yeah. Thank you, thank you. And thank you guys for continuing to listen to the Partner Profit Podcast. It's been another epic conversation, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.