Hiring a Team of Real Estate Agents

Are you drowning in your real estate business? Maybe there's more opportunity than you can possibly keep up with. It's probably time to start considering building a team. And I have failed more in this area in terms of bringing people into my world than anyone I know. So I feel qualified to help you through this journey. Traditional success as a real estate agent will have you working every evening, every weekend, and, and it's simply not sustainable. At some point you have to consider leverage in terms of not only systems and marketing and those types of things, but people and empowering people in your business to drive those systems that you've built. Stick around to the end of this video. I'm going to be giving you a exact blueprint, the six stages of real estate growth. So stick around for that. If you liked the video, please give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and and turn on notifications so you're the first to know about videos when they hit. Let's break down this journey from agent to team leader or coach to business owner. It starts with having a clear vision for what you want in your real estate business. That's the first word of advice I would give you if you're looking to build a real estate team. It's this vision for me. Back in my early days of real estate, I sold 44 homes as a solo agent. My first full year in the business. It was traditional success. I was like easily top 1% of my market, yet I was working full seven days a week. I had no freedom of time whatsoever and I was stressed out all the time. And I could not show up as a great husband, I could not show up as a great dad, or even spend quality time with my newborn Anders at the time. And so the vision for me was a simple vision about leveraging the form of people and system. Three years out, where I was working 40 hours a week and only working listings during business hours, a simple vision allowed me to build the team that ended up, you know, going to 400 plus transactions just a few years later. So that's number one, is a vision. And I guess the second point I would say here is to make sure you're ready to make this transition. You know, a lot of times, you know, agents get so burnt out in their business, yet they don't have enough opportunity, they don't have enough leads coming in to support bringing on agents. And so make sure that you're creating the problem because you're attracting so many buyer opportunities in so many segments. Seller opportunities in the business that's another mistake I see is that, you know, agents just aren't ready to make the transition. Here are a few things that you need to know if you're going to start a real estate team. First thing is that you need to be ready. It's a big responsibility to get someone to stop what they're doing and join what you're doing and join your real estate team. You must be ready, not just mentally. You have to have enough leads, you have to have the right systems, the sales systems in place, the accountability, the cadence, the tracking, all of that has to be in place before you allow someone to come into your world. For me, I spent a full two and a half years just I was doing the business. So it's this, I do it, we do it, they do it, I do. It was 2009. I did 58 transactions. I only hired my first buyer agent late in that year. So I had a full time administrator and I hired a buyer agent late in that year. I was already like full on 60, 70 hours a week. I was ready for someone to come into my world and I had built out those tracking systems. I was generating enough leads, more than enough leads for someone else to come on. I had established my own cadence and I knew what I was looking for in someone that would join my team. That's the second thing I would say is make sure the people you bring into your world are people that you truly want to serve. What I mean by that, there is no other leadership besides servant leadership. You can't bring someone in and just expect them to, you know, be self managed and help hold themselves accountable. You need to be ready to come in and serve and help them achieve at a level that they couldn't do on their own. It's a critical distinction that I see many times. Agents that want to become business owners, they forget that culture matters. You know, culture, that's your core values. Those are the things that define who you are and most importantly, who you want to surround yourself with. So some core values that we subscribe to that we hold near and dear to our heart is that we embrace accountability and discipline. We're not afraid to hold ourselves and each other accountable. You know, we hustle and work hard. When you're interviewing someone to come into your world, make sure that they exhibit those core values. Right? You can ask questions about when you're in college, you know, tell me, did you work any part time jobs? Were you ever captain of a sport? Right. You can identify their work ethic or if they really do Embrace accountability and discipline personally, before they come into your world. That brings me to my last point and probably the biggest mistake I made over the years. It actually came from my pastor, Steven Furtick of Elevation Church. And this was probably over 10 years ago. He gave a sermon, it was called. The series was called the Power of Potential. And there's actually like a minute, 30 second clip on YouTube. If you look up Steven Furtick, F U R T I C K Relationship advice, you will see that minute and 30 seconds that changed everything for me when it came to looking for talent. And it was basically this. He was speaking to women at the time. He said, women, you know, ladies, you guys are all about guys with potential. Like, you see a guy that has all this potential, yet he's like eyeballs in debt, he's addicted to porn, he is overweight, he is watching sports, you know, Saturday, college football Sunday, both, all three games, right? He has massive potential. Yet how he's actually showing up, his patterns are not representative of what he's going to do in the future. So at that moment, it was this major awakening for me. I guess it was probably a year or two into my hiring, you know, me building a team, because I remember looking back at all the people that didn't make it, was looking for potential, yet they had no pattern of fitting the things I knew they needed to fit to be able to be successful in real estate. Most importantly, accountability, discipline, hustle, work hard, positive attitude, growth, mindset, team players, those sorts of things. Those are all things that you can get really specific on before you go into a relationship, a business relationship with someone, someone. So always look for patterns rather than potential. We don't need to bring folks into our world that have potential yet they haven't proven themselves. Practically speaking, you know, real estate is a contact sport. So as you're building your business, you better be, you know, paying attention to the fact that you have to time block your day and make, you know, contact, have meaningful conversations, set appointments, meet people you know, and sign people to work with you as a buyer client or as a seller client. Oftentimes in the recruiting process, when you make that decision to build a team, you forget what it took to get to the point where you are in your business and somehow we just forget that. Oh, maybe it would be helpful if this person that I'm bringing onto my team had any experience whatsoever in customer service or being on the phone or new business development or anything. A lot of times someone gets their real estate license, they have no pattern of anything related to sales and we bring them into our world and we hope that they're going to, you know, live up to their potential. And I will tell you 9.5 times out of 10, it doesn't translate. So make sure you're honest with yourself about who you're bringing into your world and their ability to really hit the ground running. Because when you start building a team, you still have to remain in production. So you still have to do the job of real estate agent. Now you're a recruiter, an interviewer. You have to onboard these new agents and coach them and you're still building systems in your business. You're still having to now lead generate, but also bring on, you know, your recruiting and lead generating for talent. So it gets overwhelming pretty fast. And if you have someone in your world that you, they don't want to serve, that hasn't proven to themselves and before they enter your world that they have the ability to succeed in your world, then just do yourself a favor, do them a favor and don't let them into your world. If you're at the point in your journey where you wish there was just a roadmap, right? If, if someone could just show you the different stages of growth, how you need to show up personally, the systems you need to put in place, the questions you need to ask yourself. I've got that report. I put it together. It's called the Real estate Business Growth navigator. Go to realestate business growth.com, that's realestate business growth.com and I'll take you through every one of those stages. Super valuable if you're looking to make this transition from agent to manager, coach to business owner. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn notifications on so you'll be the first to know about new videos, when they'll hit, when they hit. I'll leave you with a quick story before I let you go. Clients of mine, A.J. and Crystal Johnson, they were in a position when I first met them. They did 28 million the year I met them. Their team was not one. It was all potential. No patterns of success, a bunch of misfits. When it came to the the true core values that AJ and Crystal held near and dear to their hearts. We decided the easiest way through that situation was to let everyone on their team go. That's not all the time that we do that they just knew that these group of individuals, they were good people and they never were going to show up the way that they needed them to. We wiped the slate clean that next year. We were able to fill the team with folks that were a core values fit, that were willing to do the work that had demonstrated a pattern of success before. And they went from 28 to 32 million that next year. They wiped out five agents. They rebuilt and did. And they did 4 million more that next year. They went on to 40 to 50 million. They did 90 million just a few years later. And now their core values, the culture of their business, which we call core values, they are one of the tightest group of individuals. They're all, you know, they're. They all show up in the world very similar, and they're able to coach each other, lean on each other, push each other, hold each other accountable. So even if you need to make some necessary endings that might feel hard, you know, sometimes on the other side of those difficult conversations will open yourself up to just an awesome opportunity for growth. We'll see you in the next video.