How to Manage the Human Interaction in Your Business

Are you challenged when it comes to bringing people into your business and then helping them succeed and achieve your goals through them? If you're like me, this was the most challenging part of building a real real estate business. I didn't have any experience hiring or onboarding or managing people. I was sort of good at building systems and spreadsheets and I figured out how to, you know, build a sales process and build lead generation pillars, the human interaction piece of my business. I failed more than anyone I know. And I did figure out a few things that I want to share with you today. First, if you liked the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel, make sure you turn notifications on and stick around. I'm going to give you access to a free report that will take you through all six stages of business growth and help you to navigate growth through each of those stages. When it comes to leading, managing, and holding team members accountable, there are a handful of lessons that I've learned that I want to share with you today. First and foremost is to make sure you know who you want to surround yourself with. This is the mistake I made for too many years in my business. I wasn't clear on what I wanted my culture to look like. And when I say culture, it's core values. It's like, who are you as a person? For me, the things that were really important was I was someone who loved accountability and discipline. I was willing to hustle and work hard. I knew I needed a growth mindset to achieve at different levels. Right. I knew a positive outlook in a tough business was necessary. I knew that I wanted team players versus individual players, right, to be successful. And that was that made up my core values for forever. These remain our core values today. So as you look at your business and your ability to scale your business, and maybe you have people in your world that maybe you don't have core values, which is sort of shocking. And a lot of agents turned team leaders, you know, think that core values is sort of an exercise that they really don't need to pay attention to. Your core values make or break you. They're the thing that you hire to, you fire to, you reward and recognize. And you have honest conversations like, hey, listen, you're not showing up in the way we need you to. And when I look at how you're hustling and work hard, I'm not seeing it. What's going on? Is there something personally that's going on that I can help you through? On our team, we track our numbers because accountability is important. And if I don't know what you're doing on a day to day basis, I can't coach you to success. Do I have your agreement, your commitment that you'll kind of get back in the game when it comes to tracking accountability and discipline? Write real conversations in your business, in the interview process, like, hey, Lars, give me an example, you know, pre today of how you have hustled and work hard. It could be like, well, in college, you know, I played sports, I was the captain, I worked two jobs and I graduated in three years. Okay, check. Right. Growth mindset, you know, Lars, give me an example. Now tell me the last three books that you read and why they were meaningful to you. Lars, I've never read a book. I think everything I know now is all I ever will need to know. Clearly not a growth mindset. If growth mindset is important to you, you can figure those things out ahead of this person coming into your world. That's the first thing. Core values culture. Know it, know who you want to be around and protect it. Second part is I swiped from Geno Wickman and his work on traction. He says someone on your team, they have to be a core, core values fit, right? So right person, yet you have to put them in the right seat. The right seat comes into play in terms do they get it, do they want it and do they have the capacity to do the position? So let's take the example of bringing an agent into your world and helping identify the right person. But also know if they're able to do the position and if they're actually doing the position the way it's to be done in a real estate team. Sometimes we sort of forget that we are hiring specific positions. We're not just taking anyone that has their real estate license say, yeah, come on my team. It's going to be great. You're going to have all the potential in the world. You know, let's, let's run after this thing. And so when I say get it, there's a specific job you're hiring them for. If it's a buyer agent, there's five things. Typically, you know, it's new business development, it's, you know, the ability to service clients. It's following up with leads. There's specific things that they have to know how to do or at least have the will to do. And then you can teach them the skill. But that's, do they really get it? Are they programmed genetically to do that job at a high level? Do they want it a lot of times, agents come into a team and they don't really want to be there. They had this thought about what their real estate career could look like. They don't really want the job of a buyer agent. They want to do listings or they want freedom of time in terms of, like, not having to work and still make a lot of money. They just don't really understand what the business is and they don't really want the position. Last thing is the capacity to do it. That's time capacity, emotional capacity. Right. Real estate's a hard business. You need thick skin to be able to survive and thrive in this industry. So when you look at the people that you're surrounded by and the people that you're bringing into your world, do they get the position that means they can really do it? Do they really want it, and do they have the capacity to do it? The last thing I'll mention here, in terms of really being able to bring in the right people and to nurture them to build something bigger than yourself, is to implement a regular meeting cadence. These are just open, honest conversations with your team members about what's working and what's not working in the business. These could be, you know, weekly team meetings, weekly functional meetings, sales or operations, depending on the size of your business. Or it could just be coaching sessions. You know, twice a month, every person on our team gets a coaching conversation around what's working, what's not working in their business. And then we also have quarterly conversations where we dive a little bit deeper. What's going on in your personal life? You know, where are you struggling right now? How can I help you, really? Coming to the team member from a servant's heart to be able to help them, you know, achieve at a high level in the business. And then even monthly team health surveys, we've implemented that tool where we just ask our team members, like, what do you see happening in the business that we don't see? Where is there unhealthiness, dysfunction, lack of trust in the business? You know, this cadence and structure in the business, that's going to be something that you can really lean back on and have faith that your business has this momentum because you've implemented this regular meeting cadence. And with most meetings, there's an element of data associated with it. So. So if you're doing an agent one on one, you know, which we do twice monthly, you're looking at their numbers, their meaningful conversations, their appointments that they're setting, meeting and signing up new clients, right? Are they putting in the effort to get the result that they're looking for or you know, are they not able to do it or if they're not able to do it, is it a skill issue or a will issue? If it's a will issue, do they have something going on? Personally, you're really showing up to those interactions in such a way where you're looking to serve and identify how can I help you succeed? What can I, what obstacle can I get out of your way for you to succeed at the highest level? When I think about one of our members that has really done an epic job with the human interactions in the business, I think of Dave Hook out of Central pa. His business now he's two, maybe almost three years out of production. When I first met Dave, his wife Jenny was pregnant with their first child. I think they have three, three kids now. I think it's like age five, three and, and two or something crazy like three kids under five. So it's crazy household. But when I went, when I met Dave, he was, I think he only had a part time administrator and he was selling about 80 to 90, 90 homes and he was working the 80 hour workweek, 4,000 hours a year and he was not making a lot of money if you look at his, his hourly wage. And we just committed to work together. A giant leap of faith for Dave. I think he only came into real estate B school in our second year so we were just getting started in the business and he was a perfect fit for what we offered. He went from that 80 hour work week, he's more than 5X'd his take home income, he's cut his hours by more than 50%. He works less than 40 hours a week. They have three kids now. He has Fridays off. He's been out of production for two to three years now and he has complete freedom of not only time in his business, but freedom of money. His wealth situation is completely different than it was when we met. And also and most importantly is freedom of stress. When you bring down your stress, you're able to show up, you know, in your marriage, in your job as a parent with your faith, right? With your physical body, your emotional well being, for your friends, for your community in such a way that you can't do if you're just grinding out transactions, struggling to build a team, but you don't have the right structure or systems in place. So Dave has just been an awesome example and he's still in our world today. If you're at the point in your journey where you want that roadmap go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com I'll go through the same stages of growth to go from you know, you at 100k or 500k, how do you get to a million to 1.5 million. How do you exit production? How do you become a business owner? So go to realestate business growth.com if you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on as well. This business provides an awesome opportunity to build out systems and have empowered people run those systems so you actually have something that's sustainable, something that systematically increases your net worth and gives you time freedom. We'll see you in the next video.