A real estate agent explains how to stop doing deals yourself and build a business that runs without you. The speaker walks through the phases of growth, from survival mode to scaling with a team, and why staying in production kills your company's potential.
Questions this video answers
Increase from roughly 425–450 sides to 1,200 sides by 2020.
10,000 sides per year across ~10 markets (10-team, 10,000 unit ambition).
Over $10,000.
9:00–10:00 active listings and appointment review; 10:00–11:00 buyer agent meeting; 11:00–11:30 team meeting; 11:30–12:15 personal development; then one-on-ones and senior leadership meeting.
Twice a year.
So I'm going to unpack this for you here. There's a lot to look at here. This is the real estate business navigator. And it really helps explain how I went from survival mode, right? Leaving a pretty cozy corporate job to ramping and scaling my business, what we call the build phase, to then leading and ultimately exiting production and even day to day responsibility. I call that the inspire phase. And now I'm shifting toward just true business ownership and I have more of a consultative role in my business. Alright, the exit phase, you know, the realization that you're not that important. There was a sermon that my pastor delivered and the title of the sermon was you're not that important. And it was kind of the same context related to your faith. But realizing that your business can run without you is either a liberating thing or it's a scary thing. And for me it was liberating. I knew that I was providing all this value to my staff, my agents and my clients and everything was going great and I just wanted to keep moving up in this ascension. But a lot of team leaders get scared at the thought that they what's going to happen if I go down to stop doing listings or stop showing up at the office five, six days a week? So it's a tough pill to swallow. Vision and mission must be part of the team's DNA at this point. So it has to be part of the culture embedded in everyone on the team. Your leadership skills have to be continue to be developed. You need a key operations person at this point you probably brought them in in the lead phase, but at this point they're really stepping into their own and if they're the right person, they will really take on all of the day to day operations. Organizational strategy must be clearly articulated to the team and so the team has to understand that there is a strategy when it comes to not just the sales or marketing strategy, but organizationally there's a strategy that you're following. And your job in this phase is to really focus on margins and controlling cost and looking at cash flow. That's always a risk in a growing business, even a service oriented business where we don't actually carry our inventory, we don't own our inventory. Right. That's the cool part of what we do. Somebody else owns the inventory, we get to sell it and we make our 3%. We have a tool, business tracker tool that's included in B school that effectively cost me over $10,000 to build out, but it monitors everything in my business, all these critical items, cash Flow ROI for our marketing spend, agent productivity, profitability, monthly profitability plus forecasted profitability. Really, really cool tool and then the own phase. So it's really all about mindset. Going from being in the business but exiting day to day to becoming a true owner. And this is what I've done in my business. Most team owners won't ever take this step. They just feel like they have to keep showing up at their business. This is a mindset issue more than anything else. There's lots of examples of companies that don't have the leader showing up, right? I mean Apple continues to run without their leader. Sam Walton is not around anymore. Walmart continues to thrive. All of those companies are publicly owned. So you can technically argue that none of the owners show up. Just because you're a shareholder doesn't mean you have to show up to run the company. So just knowing that that happens all the time for some reason in real estate though it's not very common, it helps to have faith, like I just said that many companies run without the owner. Sales leadership role must be filled to avoid dysfunction. So in order to continue growing the company. And so our plans at my team is to go from roughly 425, 450 sides this year to 1200 sides by 2020. And I just organizationally we now have an operations lead and a growth expansion lead or a sales lead. So you have to have that role filled with a quality person to continue to grow and avoid dysfunction. Big hairy audacious goal. That's bhag. It must be clearly articulated for team to see something bigger in their future. So we just had an off site with my team and our BHAG is 1200 sides in 2020 with five offices. So we're actually expanding which is cool. But then our really big BHAG is 10,000 sides per year. So 101000 unit teams in 10 different markets. So 10,000 sides per year. At this point all day to day operations and sales leadership functions have been delegated and I'm only doing weekly senior leadership meetings. So my responsibilities have come down to a couple one on ones, two one on ones and three of us meeting weekly team rhythm. So knowing so having our Tuesdays are active listings and appointment review 9 to 10 buyer agent meeting 10 to 11 team meeting 11 to 11 30. Then development, personal development for the entire team from 1130 to 12 15. Then I do my one on ones, then I do my senior leadership meeting and on Fridays we do a huddle. Twice a year we do off site. So having that rhythm ensures that the team remains healthy and stays in growth mode. And it really is a grow or die sort of thing.
