How To Manage A Team Of High Performing Real Estate Agents

Are you struggling to identify, hire, recruit, or even just manage a team of sales professionals? Or maybe you're thinking about starting a real estate team and you have a fear in terms of what it would look like to manage, you know, even a single agent. And I'm here to tell you that I've been there, I feel your pain. I have failed in this area of my business more than anyone I know. And so the encouragement here is that there is a right way to do this. And in this video I want to share the pitfalls in terms of leading and managing salespeople and how to do it the right way and how to do it the wrong way, which, like I said, I've done over and over and over again, which I don't want for you and your journey. Hiring and managing salespeople is likely one of the hardest things I know that I've ever done in my business growth journey. And it probably will be one of the most challenging things that you do as well. And if you're a team leader, you already know what I'm talking about. Like these are just tough things to wrangle. Like a salesperson is just a different breed of creation and we have to approach it that way. And so in today's video, I want to break down just three things you can do that might make the process easier. And if you're at the point in your journey where you know you want to build something different, you know you want to build more of a business than be a real estate agent. I created a 15 minute training and you can find it at predictablerealestatesuccess.com or click on the link below. I just take you through the different drivers of a successful real estate business and then what we call the accelerators, which are the tools and systems that you'll need to do this the right way and avoid all the mistakes that I made in my journey. And as always, please, if you enjoy the video and the content, I really want to bring my full heart into serving you like the video. Also, subscribe and make sure you turn on notifications and also leave comments. You know, if you disagree or if you agree or if you want to ask a question, please leave comments. That helps me get excited about bringing more content to you. Here are a few things you know, as I look back on my journey as a real estate team leader, a few things that I would want you to consider to make this journey easier for you. The first thing is for you to hire to your core values. And core values are this mystical thing that, you know, in big corporations, they end up etched in some stone somewhere and very rarely do they actually become part of a business. Like a living, breathing set of values that the business lives, dies by. So when I think core values, these are the things that are non negotiable and these are, you know, everyone is aligned around these values. For my real estate team, there's six core values. You know, the first one is that we embrace accountability and discipline. Very few people actually embrace accountability, accountability and discipline. So when you identify yourself as someone that does that, we know we want to be a part of your journey as a team member, you know. Second is that we have a positive attitude, right? We've got to leave our stuff at the front door when we come into business and get to work. We have a growth mindset, right? We're willing to expand upon what we know today. Another one is that we're willing to hustle and work hard. You know, there are a lot of real estate agents, and if you're not willing to work hard and just show up to work a little bit earlier and maybe work a little bit later, it's likely you won't be successful. You know, in our market, there are 17,000 agents right now. That's up from 5,000 when the great Recession, the Great Recession in the housing crisis was so worth more than three times the amount of agents. And they're going after the same business day in and day out. And then another one is we do the right thing. You know, we are going to show up whether anyone's looking or not, and we're going to do the right things in the business to be successful. So that's your core values. Do you have a set of core values that you're willing to hire, reward and fire people based on those core values? And it's not as complicated as we make it out to be. If I'm interviewing somebody for a job of being a salesperson on my team, I'm actually looking for examples where I don't care what their experience was. If they were a server or a bartender or if they worked, you know, in a corporate job, are there hints of, of them hustling and work hard? Are there hints of them, you know, embracing accountability and discipline? Growth mindset? What's the last book that they've read? You know, positive attitude? Can you just tell being around this person? You know, one other I forgot to mention is Team Player, right? Are they interested in being part of a team or is this just a means to an end and they really want to be a solo agent, but they failed in that endeavor. So make sure you're super clear on your core values. The second thing is make sure you have a clear path to success. And most real estate teams, there isn't this, you know, 90 day plan for a new agent to actually become productive and start earning income. The biggest thing that kicks people out of real estate is the lack of cash flow. And so if you're building a real estate team and you don't offer a quicker path to payday, there is no real value proposition. And so a lot of real estate teams, I feel like they're not based on, you know, a clear path to income, a clear path to doing real estate, you know, better and easier than any other option out there. And so what this looks like in my real estate team is we have what we call an agent incubator program where we teach them the exact scripts that they need to be successful. We teach them, you know, where to mine for business, how to reach out to their sphere of influence, you know, the different technology tools that they'll need to employ in their business to be successful, their time management, time blocking, you know, just the discipline around being productive and, you know, really sort of embedding this culture of productivity in them so that they can see, you know, if you've been on our team for a number of years, you're making multiple six figures, risk free income, you're working hard, but you're taking home multiple six figures. You know, so we have a clear path to newly licensed to, in less than a handful of years, making multiple six figures. So ask yourself, if you're a team leader, you definitely need to make sure that you have this clear path to success. And if you're looking to build a team, you know, make sure you have that path. In real estate business school, you know, part of the training we provide is to give you all of that agent incubator program laid out step by step. So it's literally a swipe and deploy into your business. The third thing I would say is to make sure that you're providing a cadence to the salespeople on your team. And what I mean by cadence is make sure that there's an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly cadence. So every year make sure that a salesperson needs a plan. They have income goals just like you do. So make sure you sit them down and you create a plan for the year. Every quarter, we've gotta break down that year into a quarter at a time. Every quarter has 13 weeks and it has you know, three months. And so we need to be really intentional about how we break down our plans into bite sized pieces all the way to the point where, hey, if you time block your day, five days a week, exactly like this, and you work on the things that we tell you to work on as we've onboarded you, you will have this clear path to success. I feel like a lot of team leaders are afraid to speak honestly to folks when they come onto their team. They're not willing to tell them like the good, bad, ugly about what the journey looked like for them and they shy away from accountability and they leave it up to chance if that agent's going to be successful. And so they don't give them the best chance of living up to their potential. The income potential even for team members is unbelievably awesome. You know, if you put these different elements together in the right way, you'll have the success you're looking for. You know, I think about Dave Friedman, who is in Charleston, South Carolina. He started out as a solo agent in real estate B School, did 35 transactions before he joined, joined up with us and he went on to, to 65 to fast forward a few years, 375 transactions. Last year it was his choice to get out of production and now he's succeeding 100% through his sales team. And so he went down and went all in to like, how can I build a high performing sales team? And it is based on these three principles. He has a clear path to success, he hires to core values and he has a very clear cadence where he is the person in his sales team's life that is going to help them achieve their plans, their three year vision, their one year plan to meet their income goals so they can live this amazing life and use the business he's created as the platform to do it. And in the process of doing that, Dave has gone from working 70 to 80 hours a week to working 30 to 40 hours a week, making close to 10 times the amount of money, take home money than he was when we started working together. He's not doing that because he doesn't deserve it or he's getting overpaid. Right. He's built this system to provide an opportunity for agents when they join his team to go from maybe they were an average agent before or they came from another industry and now they can become a high performing real estate professional in the environment that he created. If you're looking to take your business from, you know, barely getting by and actually build a real business out, I put together a training. It's called Predictable Real Estate Success. You can go to predictablerealestatesuccess.com or you could click on the link below to get access to the training. It goes through the key drivers and the accelerators and the tools and systems. Everything that I went through to be able to go from struggling in the early days to having complete time and money freedom. If you've enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. It helps us the Google YouTube SEO world. Make sure you subscribe to the channel, turn notifications on, and leave comments. I want to interact with you. I want to hear where you're struggling. I want to hear where you agree, where you disagree, and as long as you keep it constructive, I want to hear from you. So please leave comments. Until next time. This is Lars Hedinborg and we'll talk to you soon. Sam.