This transcript excerpt records a dialogue about retaining existing team members while scaling a business. Speakers advise leaders to set a clear vision for the future business, have open conversations about changes (including compensation/splits), and request trust from team members during a 12–36 month transition while delivering value through added services and operational improvements.
How do you start to set the vision for where the team is going that will help the people that are already there not want to bail immediately? Right. Because people hate change and start to catch the vision of where the team is going to the point where they might want to stay and kind of hang on through that transition, even if it means adjusting their splits or trading some of their splits for different benefits in other areas and just kind of staying on through that transition. Because I think that's where a lot of team owners and leaders would start to go. Ooh, I don't know. I don't know if I can do all that because essentially I'm putting my entire existing team at risk in the hopes of maybe building this new thing that I'd have to essentially start from scratch. So I think to me that's a first aid problem of setting the vision that makes the people that you want to keep want to stay. So what would you say to those people that are in that situation?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just an open conversation with those that are around you currently. You know, I guess first I would say get clear in terms of what the type of business you want. You know, if most team owners are, it's super chaotic, they're super stressed, they have a lot of overhead, they're not tracking properly, they don't have systems running their business. So I would get clear on where you wanted the business to be. And then you're just getting people to see that, you know, if I can help you focus more on the things that make you money and less on the things that, you know, are more administrative in nature from a salesperson's perspective, you know, would, would you trust me over the Next, you know, 12, 24, 36 months, it's a one, two, three year process to build it out. And as I add, you know, different services that make your job easier and allow you to sell more homes and focus more on dollar productive activities, you know, our compensation structure is going to change. And most agents, you know, understand that we take people through that iteration of, you know, if, if we determine that you need, you have a 20% issue, you know, on we have some teams that have like 20 plus percent mismatch between the level of service they're providing and the splits they're overpaying by 20%. And so we just have to guide them through what that looks like. And it's just open conversations, you know, about, you know, the reason, you know, so a team leader that's doing a bunch of production would sit down with their team and say, hey, the reason I'm doing all these deals, you know, it's because I've kind of messed some things up in terms of, you know, how this thing is structured, you know, and just talk openly and say, guys, I don't want to work with buyers, you know, so that's something that I can commit to getting out of. You know, I did 30 buyer deals last year. I can commit to getting out of those deals, you know, and adding more value to you guys in these ways. But we're going to have to adjust splits along the way, and you've got to trust me, and you've got to ask for that trust, and you've got to deliver on it.
